All Politics are God's Politics

Moroccan Islamism and the Sacralization of Democracy

Ahmed Khanani

• Verlag: Rutgers University Press
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781978818637
• Thema: Ciencias sociales
• Thema: Sociología

Contemporary mass media descriptions of Muslims often suggest that Islam and Muslims are fundamentally undemocratic. Policy-makers in the West have weaponized these descriptions in attempts to legitimize anti-Muslim right-wing policy developments across the West and in the United States in particular, from surveillance in the aftermath of 9/11 to the anti-Islamic travel ban of 2017. But are Muslims undemocratic? Ahmed Khanani argues that this is not the case. In All Politics are God's Politics, Khanani shows that in fact, the opposite holds true: for socially conservative, politically active Muslims (Islamists), democracy or dimuqr??iyya reflectsand extends their religious values. By drawing on conversations with over 100 Islamists in Morocco, this book enables readers to understand and appreciate the significance of dimuqr??iyya as a concept alongside new prospects for Islam and democracy in the Arab Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Khanani's in-depth analysis of the Moroccan case brings these Islamists and their attending political views to the forefront.Unfolding in a region marked by upheavals and academic inability to diagnose significant political developments, All Politics are God's Politics contends that by attending to ordinary language everyday citizens use, one can in fact begin to accurately understand politics. Readers will discover that by connecting Islam to dimuqr??iyya, Islamists alter the meanings of both Islam and dimuqr??iyya, broaching new, democratic forms of Islam and rendering the everyday practices of dimuqr??iyya, like protesting electoral violations, protecting freedom of speech, and voting sacred.

1 Ordinary Language Philosophy and the Study of Dimuqrāṭiyya

If I know the meaning of a word or phrase I know something like a body of unwritten rules, or something like an unwritten code or general recipe. I have learned to use the word correctly in an unlimited variety of different settings. What I know is, in this respect, somewhat like what I know when I know how to use a knight or a pawn at chess. I have learned to put it to its work any-when and anywhere, if there is work for it to do.

—Gilbert Ryle, “Ordinary Language”

Our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they have found worth making, in the lifetimes of many generations.

—J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers

On a hot Monday afternoon (July 23, 2011), I met with four “sisters” of varying ages, all ‘adlists, in a working-class neighborhood in Salé for a lively discussion about dimuqrāṭiyya, human rights, Islam, and Moroccan politics. The young daughter of our host served sugary mint tea and delicious home-baked chebaqia that was being prepared in anticipation of Ramadan. In chapter 2, I will discuss some of what the sisters said; here, I focus on a moment that occurred as I was about to leave. The man who had facilitated our meeting—Driss, a close confidant of mine—suggested we partake in a brief prayer, and the other five of us nodded our approval. As I lowered my briefcase to the ground, Driss surprised me, asking our host something along these lines: “And, please, will you lead for us, sharīfa?” He then turned to me and said, “See, we have dimuqrāṭiyya, too.”¹

Sharifa Hakima’s prayer begin with her recitation of a brief surah (chapter from the Qurʾan), followed by duʿa (supplications) for Muslims around the world, for both Driss and I to speedily and happily marry, and for my safe return to my family in America. We concluded by reciting the fātiha (the opening surah of the Qurʾan). Following the prayer Hakima asked her daughter to give me a box of chebaqia to “take home for your Mother.”²

I was struck that Driss had used dimuqrāṭiyya to describe Hakima’s leading us in a volitional prayer. By doing so, he revealed much about the grammar of dimuqrāṭiyya in dārija and, importantly, to dārija speakers. His use of dimuqrāṭiyya might have many possible meanings. For instance, it might suggest that dimuqrāṭiyya entails the revision of gender norms in the Muslim tradition. Thus, beginning with the underlying assumption that although women have historically been discouraged from reciting Qurʾan in front of extrafamilial men, Driss may be suggesting that dimuqrāṭiyya means that women should be able to participate as Qurʾan reciters in publics constituted by women and men. His choice of words might also mean that in dimuqrāṭiyya anyone can lead supererogatory prayers; or perhaps that people who might normally be disbarred from leading prayers in a non-dimuqrāṭiyy state could lead prayers in a dimuqrāṭiyya, thereby refashioning the requirements for achieving spiritual authority. Alternatively, Driss’s words and actions may indicate that dimuqrāṭiyya means deferring to elders (Driss was in his late twenties / early thirties and clearly younger than our host), just as it might also be that dimuqrāṭiyya could mean abiding by appropriate etiquette, the practices of hosting and being a guest. Finally, it might also be an exceptional or nonstandard use: it could be that Driss wanted to impress upon me, the researcher, how open-minded, how committed to dimuqrāṭiyya adherents of the JSM really were. Perhaps most significantly, Driss used language in a way that made sense to his audience—in this case four female members of the JSM and myself. In other words, Driss’s articulation of dimuqrāṭiyya was decidedly not absurd, not misused, not abusing language or facts.³

Attending to ordinary language moves beyond right and wrong conceptualizations of words and, instead, into charting the ways people use words, thereby accounting for the meanings that words have in everyday conversations to users of specific languages. This particular quote relies on my memory and is inexact, but much of this book is dedicated to unpacking exact, ordinary uses of dimuqrāṭiyya in dārija. In this situation, Driss suspected that I was familiar enough with the Muslim tradition that the novelty of a woman leading prayer would register with me; he also ascertained that I was both invested in the Muslim tradition and actively participating in transforming it, in broadening its horizons to include things like dimuqrāṭiyya, women’s rights, and perhaps even human rights. In other words, Driss’s articulation of dimuqrāṭiyya was at least partially conditional on a series of assumptions he made about me.

My interlocutors’ perceptions of me (as a Muslim, a Pakistani American researcher, a doctoral student, a presumably straight and middle-class man, a not-yet-married man [māzāl], and a man who comfortably spoke dārija, albeit with a discernable accent) all informed this scenario. Local norms of modesty and discretion and the (social) fact of my being a man had meant that it had taken dozens of calls to different people in the JSM before I could arrange this conversation with female ʿadlists. As with all my conversations, I asked my interlocutors where they would like to meet: in this case, one of my interlocutors’ home. Moreover, abiding by norms of modesty and widely known hadith regarding encounters across (assumed) binary gender lines, there were several women present. I was also, to members of the JSM in the Salé-Rabat-Casablanca region, a dear friend of a particularly well-known and respected ʿadlist (Ali) and a newly minted friend of several other ʿadlists, including Kareem and Driss. I also had the credibility of having spoken with important figures in the JSM.

Perhaps the more important qualifier about Driss dubbing a female ʿadlist leading our prayer dimuqrāṭiyya is that it made sense to native speakers of dārija. Nobody present objected to or voiced any surprise with his formulation. Indeed, there was no glitch, no moment of surprise in the interval between Driss’s request and Hakima’s leading of prayers: all six of us simply bowed our heads slightly and followed Hakima’s cues in her supplications.

In my exploration of such ordinary uses of dimuqrāṭiyya, which include a broad array of meanings, among Moroccan islāmiyūn, I draw primarily on the works of Wittgenstein, Ryle, Austin, Pitkin, and Schaffer. If we accept this framework for language, then rather than searching for an ideal, or true, meaning of democracy, we must search out empirical patterns of democracy—in equal measures a return and revision to democratic theory popular in the American academy in the 1950s to 1970s (e.g., Dahl 1956; Cnudde and Neubauer 1969). Ordinary language philosophy informs the entirety of this project. To this end, what I attend to, technically speaking, the unit of observation, in this project is not the language a given person employs. Rather, more precisely, the unit of observation is dārija, and specifically uses of the word dimuqrāṭiyya in the ordinary language of native speakers who identify as islāmiyūn. Thus, for much social-scientific research, it is vital to inquire about how many people were involved, always in the hopes of extrapolating from a sample to a population. In contrast, pursuant to the logic of ordinary language philosophy, for this book more significant questions are: “Did the people I speak with use dimuqrāṭiyya in ways that resonate with other native speakers’ uses of the word? Does this strike them as a typical (or bizarre) use of the word?” and “Was I able to capture the range of effective/reasonable usages of dimuqrāṭiyya among dārija speakers?” Of course, the set of people I spoke with is important: below I describe the strategies I employed to arrange meetings with my interlocutors and also offer some background on which islāmiyūn I met and where I met them.

Methodological Underpinnings

For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein⁴

Wittgenstein’s claim that to understand what a word means one must study how it is used guides this project. Indeed, this Wittgensteinian insight informs the very question that I ask most frequently: what does a particular use of dimuqrāṭiyya tell us about the grammar of the word? This orientation toward language also informs the research I undertook in pursuit of (always provisional) answers to this question, and the types of information that I proffer as evidence for my claims.

Ordinary Language Philosophy

If, to borrow a metaphor and chronology from Ryle, twentieth-century philosophers charted terrain from debates over “psychological issues” to the “Platonic … the domain of abstract, or conceptual entities, of possibilities, essences, [and] timelessly subsisting universals,” ordinary language philosophers intervened by directing attention away from the psychological or abstract and, instead, toward language, broadly, and practices of meaning in particular ([1971] 2009a, 259). While ordinary language philosophy attends to language, somewhat counterintuitively, it is inattentive to the specific people who wield language. To this end, Pitkin observes, “The ordinary man may well be ignorant of or careless about the distinctions to be found in the language; that does not matter.… The appeal is not to the ordinary man, but to the regularities in our language, to the ordinary contexts in which a word or expression is at home, where it occurs naturally” (1972, 17). That is why this project is not invested in the individual characteristics of the Moroccan islāmiyūn I spoke with but rather in the language of my interlocutors.

Ordinary language philosophy is grounded in an antiessentialist orientation toward language—this undergirds Wittgenstein’s celebrated means for thinking about how words work. Ordinary language philosophers describe their orientation toward language as moving away from ostensive definitions and “proper names” (e.g., Austin 1961, 29). Starting from the premise that words and their referents have neither an essential nor a necessary relationship, Wittgenstein develops two analogies to demonstrate his pragmatic understanding of language—figuring words as tools and also as pieces in a game ([1953] 1986). Both analogies position words as things to be used: they have functions in specific contexts and become nonsensical or, at least, misused in others. Rorty (2010) is critical of Wittgenstein’s use of “nonsense,” though Ryle and Austin present compelling responses: First, Ryle’s replacing “nonsensical” with the claim that one might misuse words or, more precisely, engage in “speech-faults” (e.g., [1971] 2009b, 424) addresses Rorty’s concerns. Second, Austin’s argument that words can never be nonsensical (rather, it is only ever sentences that can have meaning and therefore have the possibility of nonsense; 1961, 24) also speaks to Rorty’s anxieties while further refining ordinary language philosophy. In any case, the analogies of words as tools and as pieces in a game contribute to widely employed ideas developed by ordinary language theorists, including the notions of “family resemblances,” “language games,” and of language as “performative.”

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