Scholars' Corner

The Institute for
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Islam and the Jewish-Christian Encounter

Response by
Taylor Branch

It's such a huge subject, but such a fun subject, isn't it?: whether we're dancing, or whether we're trying to figure out what to do in Israel. When the ICJS group went to Israel in 1992, it snowed more than a foot. We couldn't go into a lot of places because the snow was too thick. I also remember, when we were there they opened the gate up in the lake because it was going to overflow, and they released all these fish down into the Dead Sea -- millions of fish were killed -- because there was so much rain, so much snow. It was really biblical, to the point that the chief rabbi of Israel -- this was in the newspaper; I assume it was the Ashkenazi chief rabbi -- ruled that it was O.K. to pray that it stop raining. They said there'd been many times when he ruled that it was O.K. not to pray for rain, but that this was the first time in memory that he had ruled that it was O.K. to pray to stop raining. We felt the impact of these things.

The lessons that we learned, the history that we absorbed of the pluralism and the many, many schools of thought in the development of historical Islam from Sulayman to me is reassuring in two ways. First of all because of the humanity of his presentation. It makes you feel that these are kindred struggles because we've had them in Christianity, which is more worried about sex in schools than anything else in theology, and of course in Judaism. To hear all of that in Muslim history is quite reassuring because it shows that we're in the same stuggle, we are part of the same humanity, and now we're in the same country and in the same shrinking world, trying to figure out what to make of all of this.

I would like to jump forward, though, in time to today, because it seems to me that much of that history is shared and rich, but it goes in the time before what Sulayman mentioned as the last two or three hundred years, when you've had the development of democracy as first a joke in the world; it was completely laughed at. I cite the example a lot -- and this is less than a hundred years ago -- when Teddy Roosevelt went to the funeral of King Edward in London, and they made him march way back at the back. There were only a few non-blooded royalty there, and he marched among what they called the "republican representatives," which was pretty much like among the homeless. The assumption was that democracy was kind of a fluke in America, and that it didn't have the backbone because it didn't have the external discipline to survive in the world.

We still have that notion. When September 11th hap-pened, it's "no more Mr. Nice Guy; get out the spies." We need James Bond. We need secrets. We need the military. Democracy is not strong enough. The lesson of our history is that democracy is our strength. We should have open trials. We should have debate. That's where our strength is. But all of us have this tendency to say, "Gosh, when the chips are down, we need the man on the white horse." Right? If that logic were to prevail, the first thing we would do in crisis is to strip the vote from all women and from all older men, have a Janissary democracy -- warrior class, take the press away, and have all secrets. Believe it or not, there are some people in our government who are pretty much like that.

But what I want to talk about is democracy itself, because this is the peculiar context. Osama bin Laden is a Saudi who is angry that American soldiers are on Saudi Arabian soil. By his own profession, many times. There-fore, he blows up a building in New York. Now why isn't he in Saudi Arabia, telling the Saudi king to get rid of the American soldiers? Because the answer, I think, to Sulayman's question -- Is the Saudi royalty likely to give up its royal prerogatives? -- is a resounding "not if he can help it." This is one of the most autocratic regimes on earth. He has no outlet for political or any other kind of reform in Saudi Arabia. The majority of those hijackers are Saudis with no outlet for whatever their vision is in the world outside of a religious context to, as Sulayman said, take things back to the Mecca and the Medina model of a pure religious state.

Now for us as Americans, it seems to me that one of the things we have to face is that Saudi Arabia in particular, and the whole Muslim world in general, is the one region of the world where we have never even pretended to stand for democracy. We do not stand for democracy in Saudi Arabia. I saw a show the other day where they had Wolf Blitzer and a guy from the State Department, and they were discussing whether or not the Saudi monarchy, in the wake of all this, might be vulnerable. Could it be shaky? And the State Department guy says, "Absolutely not, Wolf, they have a wonderful system of government." They got into this a little bit, and they essentially asked how does he know? And he says, "Well, I know over a hundred and fifty of the royal princes, and they all really get along." This is our State Department guy talking; he could have been talking about Cardinal Richelieu. We as Americans are so nervous. Basically, we have to stuff money down the gullet of the royal family to keep our oil coming.

Therefore, to even mention democracy or freedom in that part of the world doesn't even occur in our own government. That is a crisis for our relationship with Islam. That is a crisis for Islam's relationship with democracy. The only criticism I would have about the models that Sulayman mentioned is that it seems to me that the Indonesian model is relatively new. We have to remember that Indonesia was a colony less than fifty years ago. It was a colony of the Dutch. Most of the time since it's been a military dictatorship, which he mentioned also as the model for the separation of church and state in Islam: The military takes politics, and the scholars and the jurisprudent thinkers take the field of religion, which usually is on the sidelines. So we don't really have a democratic model -- certainly not the American model -- in the Muslim world, and America is not yet comfortable with even promoting it. We had an election in Morocco ten years ago where an Islamic party won an election, and our presumption was that they would not be democrats. We basically encouraged the military to overthrow them for fear that they would have another Iran. So we presume that Islam is incom-patible with democracy -- in Saudi Arabia, where they have a monarchy, and in Morocco, where they're trying to have a democracy.

We have a lot to learn here, and it seems to me that the best model, and the question that I would want to raise for Sulayman in discussing this is, What do we learn from Muslims in America, the American model? We too are new at democracy. I agree with him and Charles that our democratic ideals are religiously based, to a degree that we don't normally accept. Rabbi Heschel said that the prophets were the first people on earth in antiquity to set morality against power. Everybody else assumed that the powerful are the most virtuous. But the proph-ets held the kings up to scorn according to the way they treated widows and orphans. That was the mea-sure of God's justice, and democratic ideas are in there.

We don't stir with democratic patriotism and feeling be-cause we believe that mathematically voting is the way to establish Platonic or philosophical truth. A lot of us have scorn for polls, for what the average people think. Is the average common voter going to have the wisest position? Is it the formula for a philosopher-king? No. We believe in democracy because we believe it submits things to the common people and that we all have souls that have an equal worth. So we have a religiously-based idea but a secular community. That's what makes America new. Now we have millions of immigrant Muslims in the United States, relatively new for a few genera-tions, all coming from countries with little or no democratic tradition. And here they are. What is their experience as to the compatibility of democratic practice in America and citizenship with the practice of Islam? This is a new phenomenon in the world, and we have to hope that it is a phenomenon that can impact the larger Islamic world in the struggle that Sulayman said is com-ing. What is the Islamic world going to do in modernity, citizenship, and religion?

You've got Muslims from Pakistan, from Indonesia, from Bosnia, from Palestine, from England, from all over the world here in the United States, where they vote. Has anybody ever seen a news story in which the Muslim vote is mentioned? No. But they are American citizens, just like Jews are American citizens, just like everybody else is. So America is a unique laboratory. If there is a reconciliation to be had between democratic practice and Islam in the world, I have no doubt that American Muslims will play an incubation role, a vital incubation role. In that sense they are our ambassadors, our teachers. We should have them going all around the world talking about the meaning of September 11th for citizenship to them as Muslims. That's what we should be doing. But first I'd love to know a little bit more about them, and I think that is the thrilling privilege that we have, to have someone like Sulayman here in this shul on a Wednesday night in Hannukah.

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