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Demos & Generosity

By Paul Berman

This spring St. Francis College presented a forum on “the virtues of liberal democracy compared to its Islamic rivals.” Panelists were asked to respond to the argument in Ibn Warraq’s new book, Why the West Is Best. Paul Berman was one of the panelists and here’s a slightly adapted transcript of what he had to say. (Moderator Fred Siegel intervenes at one point in the course of Berman’s remarks.)

Thank you for inviting me. I agree with Ibn Warraq’s argument. I don’t like his vocabulary, though. The first aspect that I don’t like is the geographical term, “West.” When I read Ibn Warraq’s book and listen to him now, I see that he carefully makes distinctions – he understands very well that not everything from the West is good – but he has to tie himself in knots to say so.

Thus, the West is good and people like the Nazis have betrayed the West, so the war against the Germany was a war in favor of the West against the people who betrayed the West – this is a vocabulary that doesn’t help us understand anything. I would think it obvious that World War II was a civil war within the West, which then took on global characteristics.

What I think is valid in the argument is in the book’s subtitle [“A Muslim Apostate’s Defense of Liberal Democracy”]. What’s valuable is the defense of liberal democracy, and not the apologies for the West. When the West has been for liberal democracy, that is good. When the central power of the West in the mid-20th Century – Germany – turned against liberal democracy, that was bad. Similarly, when people in the rest of the world have come out for something that might be described as liberal democracy, that’s good.

I note that Ibn Warraq’s argument – if you attend to it closely – is subtler than his vocabulary. I am an Ibn Warraq fan. I read him regularly, and I do so with pleasure, but also with profit. In this present instance, only through reading his The West Is Best have I learned, late in life, that the Indian Emperor Asoka in the 3rd Century B.C. formulated a program of human rights and, thus, though having done this from a geographically Eastern perspective, might reasonably be counted as a forbearer of liberal democracy. Asoka presumably contributed to the sort of heritage we can see flourishing to a considerable degree in our own time in India, which has drawn from British liberal traditions but also enjoys its own commendable heritage and has managed to meld these together.

The second thing I don’t like in The West is Best is the tone of dismissal or insult. For instance, the notion of deriding the Islamic idea of heaven as a cosmic brothel is funny, and everyone gets the joke, and yet…

I am not a Tariq Ramadam fan. I boast of being Ramadan’s greatest detractor, at least in English. But I learned a wonderful thing from having read him and his sources. I was led back to a medieval philosopher, Al-Ghazali, who wrote a marvelous, phantasmagorical evocation of the Cosmos called “The Niche of Lights,” in which he describes an Islamic Other World or heaven that’s absolutely splendid – one of the most gorgeous and fantastical things I have ever read. A heaven divided by 70,000 veils, each of which reveals a different level of truth. It’s a neo-Platonist, fabulous…

FRED SIEGEL: Paul, before you go on, please explain who Tariq Ramadam is. I’m just curious, how many people know who Tariq Ramadam is? …About half the audience.

BERMAN: I mentioned Tariq Ramadam, who’s an Islamic philosopher from Switzerland, now at Oxford, because Ibn Warraq recalled that he had been in a debate with Ramadam a few years ago. (Ibn Warraq and I are having a mild dispute right now over who is the greater detractor of Tariq Ramadam…) But, saying it again, I find myself noting what I have learned about through Ramadan – the writings of the medieval philosopher, Al-Ghazali. We could discuss Al-Ghazali’s role in intellectual history, but he represents some sort of mixing of East and West – and, to be sure, mixings have always been the norm.

There is more I could say about a spirit of generosity, which I believe would strengthen Ibn Warraq’s argument. I, of course, admire and applaud and stand with him when he speaks, as he does in the book, about the oppression of the Christians, Baha’is and so forth. It’s amazing that we live in an era where vast persecutions somehow turn invisible. Right now we are living in a moment in which hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of people who belong to religious minorities are fleeing. Many of these people are Muslims. Shiites fleeing from Sunni persecution or sometimes Sunni fleeing from Shiite persecution. The Sufis are undergoing persecution. And the Christians are very likely the largest number of all.

But then I ask, where does this oppression come from? Is it from Easternness? Or from Islam per se? And I would say, it’s not from either of those things. It’s not from Easternness because these Christians have been living in a variety of countries – more or less peacefully – since the origins of Christianity in the Roman Empire.

And it’s not from Islam per se either because Christians were not fleeing from the Muslim world in the 19th century, if we leave aside the Balkans. They are fleeing right now from a specific thing, which I would describe as a political movement. It’s not a geographical region, the East. It’s not a religion, Islam. It’s a political movement that is generally known as Islamism, with the suffix “–ism” identifying a political movement, distinguishing it from the religion – a political movement that was founded by the grandfather of Tariq Ramadan. It’s a specific thing.

One of the reasons I reject the vocabulary of West vs. Islam is that this vocabulary – though it has an old history, not all of it ignoble – originates in its present version in the Islamist movement. That’s where it comes from right now. That’s its fundamental base. The Islamist movement is a political movement which says that the West is persecuting Islam. That Islam is under danger of an annihilatory attack from Western and Zionist forces and must be resisted.

This is a false description of world events, but it’s intellectually seductive to suppose that there is, in fact, a battle between Islam and the West. I do not think there is a battle between Islam and the West. I think there’s a battle between the Islamist movement and the people who are trying to defend themselves from the Islamist movement.

So I worry that by adopting the geographical language and maybe the tone of dismissal, we fall into the habit of allowing the Islamists’ categories of analysis to become our own. This would be a gigantic error. What we want to say – and I think this is actually the fundamental case that Ibn Warraq makes, and does so brilliantly, apart from these questions of vocabulary – is that liberal democracy has a virtue and a history, and the history has a geographical aspect. But liberal democracy in itself is not a geographical concept. Nor a religious concept. Liberal democracy is a universal concept. And it often finds itself in a struggle, beset by those who oppose it. Liberal democracy has found itself in such a struggle repeatedly over the last hundred years. With Nazis, Communists and Islamists. This struggle is the very one we find ourselves in now and we must be sure to maintain the integrity of our concepts.

In struggling against the Nazis, we didn’t want to say: “No, you are the inferior race, we are the superior race.” We wanted to say: “No, we are the liberal democrats and your racial theories are crazy.”

To the Communists, we didn’t want to say: “No, we’re the bourgeoisie, we want to oppress the proletariat and you are for the proletariat.” On the contrary, we wanted to say: “We are the liberal democrats. Your idea of a proletarian world is actually a mendacity. It leads to oppression of the workers themselves.”

Likewise, to the Islamists we don’t want to say: “We are the West and we are against you because you are inferior.” We want to say: “We are for liberal democracy. You should embrace it. Liberal democracy has room for all religions and for non-religious people, too1.”

Liberal democracy is not a geographical concept. It’s a concept for the entire world.

From July, 2012

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