In the beginning years of this blog, I published a series of articles called “Meditations on Democracy and Dictatorship” which are still regularly read today, and have had some influence. They still elicit inquiries from remote corners of the globe. They are now buried in the back pages of the blog, so I’m moving them up the chronological counter so they can have another round of visibility, especially (I hope) with younger readers. I am re-posting them in their original sequence over part of 2018. Some references in these “meditations” will date them to 2007–2008, when they were written. But I will leave them un-retouched, though I may occasionally append some retrospective notes. Mostly, they deal with abstract issues that do not need updating.
A convivial gathering of men and women in ancient Pakistan, during the Gandharan era, a time of intellectual and artistic synthesis. Gandharan art, drama and philosophy drew on influences from India, Persia and Greece.
Western Europe, and lands culturally derived from it, have made some relatively successful approximations of democracy and civil society, and combined them with noticeable prosperity. People both inside and outside this favoured zone wonder why, and they have often sought the answer in two particular areas: religious traditions, and the dramatic intellectual era called “the Enlightenment”. As someone who has written about the universal aspects of democracy, I’ve often felt some annoyance at what I consider parochial views of history, and dubious ideas of causality. I feel great sympathy for people outside the favoured zone, who are hopeful that they can have a democratic future, but are discomfited by the “second-banana” status that it seems to imply for their cultural heritage. This is especially true in the Islamic world, where past cultural glories and present embarrassments combine to make the search for democratic reform a touchy subject. I think that an excessively cartoonish view of the Enlightenment, and of the relationship between religion and democracy, is part of the problem.
I recently read two articles by Tassaduq Hussain Jillani, a supreme court justice in Pakistan. Though Pakistan has millennia of cultural achievement — it was one of the earliest centers of urban civilization — and it has a well educated population, it languishes under a crude military dictatorship. It has experienced much strife from conflicting religious factions. While its economy is a shambles, the military thugs who run the place take pride in their possession of nuclear weapons.
Mr. Jillani makes no specific reference to current events in Pakistan, but it’s obvious from the content of his articles that he belongs among the small number of people in Pakistan who hold positions of responsibility and influence, but are not corrupt, and who would like to see the best future for their country. Such people don’t wield real power, but they can’t be easily disposed of, and they command public respect. There are people like this everywhere in the world, struggling to encourage a civil society under difficult circumstances.
To this end, Judge Jillani has attempted to demonstrate that democracy is compatible with his Islamic faith. In one article [1] he argues that the Islamic world actually began with some significant advantages for developing democratic ideas.
European thinkers had to overcome a series of obstacles, many religious in origin, or at least presented in religious language, before they could “put across” any ideas of representative and elected government, human rights, and equality. Even the idea of using reason to solve problems had to contend with powerful notions of revelation and miracles. Islam, on the other hand, developed a strong and influential tradition of rationalism (Ijtehad) in its earliest phases.
Christian churches, whether Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox, were modeled on authoritarian political structures, and endorsed them in real life. The Enlightenment took place within the context of an explicit state ideology of “the Divine Right of Kings.” Jillani points out that this particular idea had no real equivalent in the Islamic world. Certainly, none of the large Islamic states were able to call upon any direct divine sanction for autocratic rule. This put the Islamic world, at least theoretically, in a better position to develop political democracy than Western Europe.
The Quran concerns itself primarily with providing a program for the individual to live a just and pious life, and provides no political program beyond admonishing the faithful to create a society where the poor and vulnerable are protected, and all are treated with respect. As he points out, despite the current public obsession with “Islamic states”, the Quran has few verses that deal with legal questions, or the state.
I would add that those few verses are not systematic, and that it’s their very sparsity which has enabled so many conflicting and convoluted schools of Sharia to flourish.
Jillani points out that several key concepts in Islamic philosophy can easily be interpreted as supportive of democracy, including: Tauheed, which denies arbitrary authority in the exercise of power; the Prophet’s advocacy of consultation as the primary mode of decision-making; Ijma, usually translated as “consensus”, which has been interpreted by some Islamic scholars as “the perfect justification or precedent in Islam for elective democracy” [2]; and Ijtehad (“striving”), which urges that public issues be decided by logical reasoning and informed judgment.
These concepts certainly provide a more than adequate foundation for building democratic institutions. They are clearer and more explicit than anything in Christian scripture and theology.
Jillani goes through the traditional names associated with the Enlightenment, seeing them as the originators of democratic thought, with a bow to the power and influence of the printing press, noting that the Ottomans suppressed the printing press, effectively keeping it out of the hands of most of the world’s Muslims. He assumes that the Enlightenment, and the democratic ideas that he associates with that period, remained a European discussion among Europeans. He simply sees it as ironic that it took place in a society whose religious basis was less fertile to it than Islam, at least in abstract theology.
He next outlines, as many others have, the history of pluralism and tolerance in Islamic societies [3]. This would easily come to mind for someone who lives, as he does, surrounded by the monuments of the Mughal court, which presided tolerantly over a multi-ethnic and multi-religious population.
Finally, he comes to the conclusion that the despotism, violence and intolerance that characterize so much of the Islamic world today have very little to do with religion. The decline of middle eastern states, such as the Ottoman empire, can be more easily explained by more straightforward economic and political processes. Islam presents no significant doctrinal barrier to developing democracy, and it would behoove Muslims everywhere to encourage that process, if only to more completely and securely practice their faith.
Jillani describes his musing as an “odyssey”, and the metaphor is apt. After visiting strange and distant lands, one can return to Ithaca and turn the parasitic suitors out. The Pakistani poet Mohammad Iqbal, wrote:
Among the stars there are still other worlds
Other fields to test the human heart.
Filled with life, these open spaces are,
And to them many caravans depart
[Bal-e-Jibril. This is my own “poetising” of the verse from a literal prose translation]
Iqbal himself was a man of broad and cosmopolitan experience, also a lawyer, and democrat, and no doubt Jillani feels a sense of continuity with this man from an earlier generation. He quotes him in his article. There is nothing new about these issues for a Pakistani.
Nevertheless, I feel that some aspects of the discussion need a fresh look. There are several assumptions here that need to be questioned.
The first assumption is one that comes naturally to anyone who’s been given a course in European history, where a standardized “connect-the-dots” story of the development of democracy focuses on the Enlightenment, reduced conveniently to a handful of authors (Descartes, Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau). This is the conventional view that democratic ideas were created “from above”, that they were the product of a small number of political actors inspired by the intellectual works of Enlightenment philosophers. But the story is just that — a story. It bears as much resemblance to what happened as the biblical creation tale does to the processes of plate techtonics and biological evolution.
Democratic ideas and democratic practices have a long history, much longer than the scholastic time-line that sees them emerging from the Enlightenment, and longer even than the the one that associates them with ancient Greece.
No Enlightenment figure used the term “democracy” in a positive sense, or used the term to describe their political ideals. The word only began to acquire its positive connotations in the 19th Century. We have retrospectively associated the word with these philosophers, because we feel that their quest for a rational world-view, their opposition to tyranny, and their tendency to support more inclusive and representative solutions to political problems ultimately facilitated the creation of modern democratic institutions.
However, the inclusive and representative institutions, and the democratic techniques that make them work, were not their primary concern, and were certainly not their invention. New England villagers had more practical experience of democratic technique a century before the American Revolution, than most of the philosophes would have approved. So did the members of many aboriginal North American councils, or, for that matter, the participants in Buddhist sangas.
For the most part, the Enlightenment thinkers themselves did not believe that they were originating a novel system of government Some thought that they were reviving the institutions of an earlier time, of the Classical ages they admired, or of a “prelapsarian” state (prevailing in the garden of Eden, before the fall of Adam and Eve from grace), or still existing in the Far East, or perhaps among the natives of the New World. Even when more accurate knowledge precluded some of these fancies, the ancient origins of representative institutions remained apparent to them. Thomas Jefferson believed, for example, that every key element of a praiseworthy republic as he conceived it, had existed among the ancient Anglo-Saxon tribes. His familiarity with tribal councils among the native people of America presented itself as a confirming parallel.
Thinkers like Jefferson were not naïve in their analysis of the origins of their own ideas. When the sage of Monticello attributed his conception of an honourable polity to the Anglo-Saxon tribes, he was speaking from a certain amount of authority. Jefferson was one of the few people alive at the time who could actually read the old Anglo-Saxon language, and was familiar with its surviving literature. In the 18th century, a fair amount was known about Anglo-Saxon history, the analysis of historical documents and philology was fairly sophisticated, and Jefferson had read prodigiously from many sources. To an educated person of today, village councils and small scale self-government do not loom large. But to an Eighteenth century savant, the interconnectedness, cross-cultural validity, and historical continuity of all such local institutions was plainly evident. A man like Jefferson, Franklin, or Thomas Paine (raised in a self-governing Quaker congregation in a self-governing East Anglian village), could see ordinary men and women governing themselves, using the most sophisticated intellectual tools for that purpose. They had no difficulty recognizing the same elements in the councils of the Delaware, Seneca and Mohawk. They could recognize them with equal facility in what they knew of the ancient republics or the tribal institutions of their most distant ancestors. For this reason, it was easy for them to see the pretensions and privileges of aristocracy as a mere parasitic infection, crudely superimposed on something which they felt to be a solid bedrock of human practice.
The idea of the “divine right of kings” was more of an ideological position contrived by kings and their lieutenants, than it ever was a component of Christian theology, and it faced more hostility from churches than allegiance. But it definitely was something that Enlightenment thinkers felt they had to discredit and overcome. In this, they probably didn’t depart much from the common sentiment. There is little evidence that ideologies of divine right, or of a natural aristocratic order, or of God’s sanctioning injustice, were taken seriously by anyone but the aristocracies themselves. Huge masses of monolithically undemocratic literature, surviving over centuries, might convey the impression that egalitarian thought did not exist before the Enlightenment introduced it. But when the bulk of the people are illiterate, or not in a position to write things that will be preserved, and those who can write are likely to benefit from inequality, you can’t expect such literature to convey anything else. On the rare occasions when we are able to get some glint of the political ideas of peasants, shepherds and fishermen from any pre-modern period, scholars are usually astonished to discover that supposedly universally accepted notions of rank and authority were, in fact, regarded with contempt. In many cases, we find folk of humble station possessing a sophisticated grasp of the issues of justice, representation, legality, privilege, and right that were relevant to their situation. This is not surprising, because this knowledge is the key to survival in communities that have no way of physically resisting the predations of a well-armed, violent, and rapacious aristocracy. In the chaos of peasant rebellions, irrational panics and hopes in supernatural salvation often overtook more reasoned tactics. But more often, the struggle consisted of a cautious and logical attempt to maneuver one’s extended family, clan, or village into some less exploited position. The bulk of the world’s human beings have been in this situation. To survive at all, they must have had some basic notions of equality, co-operation, justice, and proto-democratic techniques.
My colleague, Steven Muhlberger, has pointed me to the surviving literature of the English “Diggers” and “Levellers” of the mid-seventeenth century. The “Diggers” were peasants who unlawfully planted crops on their own village lands, which had been seized and “enclosed” by the gentry. Consider this petition signed by commoners in the parish of Walton, Surrey, in 1649. Their demands make no bones about their rejection of servility:
And the Reason is this, Every single man, Male and Female, is a perfect Creature of himself; and the same Spirit that made the Globe, dwels in man to govern the Globe;so that the flesh of man being subject to Reason, his Maker, hath him to be his Teacher and Ruler within himself, therefore needs not run abroad after any Teacher and Ruler without him, for he needs not that any man should teach him, for the same Anoynting that ruled in the Son of man, teacheth him all things. [4]
Perhaps the most striking of Leveller documents is An Arrow Against All Tyrants, written by Richard Overton in 1646. Overton’s origins are unknown, though it is assumed he had some education. The language of his many pamphlets make the more respectable Enlightenment figures seem rather tame:
For every one, as he is himself, so he has a self-propriety, else could he not be himself; and of this no second may presume to deprive any of without manifest violation and affront to the very principles of nature and of the rules of equity and justice between man and man. Mine and thine cannot be, except this be. No man has power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man’s. I may be but an individual, enjoy my self and my self-propriety and may right myself no more than my self, or presume any further; if I do, I am an encroacher and an invader upon another man’s right — to which I have no right. For by natural birth all men are equally and alike born to like propriety, liberty and freedom; and as we are delivered of God by the hand of nature into this world, every one with a natural, innate freedom and propriety — as it were writ in the table of every man’s heart, never to be obliterated — even so are we to live, everyone equally and alike to enjoy his birthright and privilege; even all whereof God by nature has made him free. [5]
The Levellers produced many such documents, many of which are currently being made accessible online. John Rowland, in his preface to the Constitution Society’s database of such literature, comments that “Their proposals continued, however, to inspire political philosophers and future generations of reformers. They appear to have influenced their contemporary, Thomas Hobbes, and later writers such as James Harrington and John Locke. Their proposals were revived during the Revolution of 1688 to produce the English Bill of Rights in 1689, which led to the Whig party in Britain that supported many of the reforms for Britain sought by the Americans during the War of Independence.” [6]
The Levellers spoke the language of the Protestant Reformation, but their attitudes were not new. England experienced a violent peasant uprising in 1381, and we have some records of what the rebels said. Here is a justly famed quotation attributed to John Ball, one of the rebellion’s leaders:
“When Adam dalf, and Eve span, who was thanne a gentilman? From the beginning all men were created equal by nature, and that servitude had been introduced by the unjust and evil oppression of men, against the will of God, who, if it had pleased Him to create serfs, surely in the beginning of the world would have appointed who should be a serf and who a lord” [7]
It seems doubtful to me that there ever was a period, such as ruling classes like to imagine, when those at the bottom of the heap accepted their position as divinely ordained, with unquestioning piety and self-abnegation. And it seems equally doubtful that peasants in any age could not formulate some theory of equality. They did not need leisured philosophers to think it up for them. Conceiving of equality is not the hard part. The difficulty lies in devising a viable strategy to achieve it. The problem appears to be identical for the poor and oppressed within Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or any other religious tradition. I see no reason why the solution should depend on some particular faith.
I’m reminded of a sequence of interviews I once saw in a documentary produced by Canadians visiting a small West African country. The local dictator assured them that none of his subjects had any knowledge of democracy, or wanted to have any. A powerful businessman dismissed democracy as a concept completely “alien” to the local culture. A prestigious academic explained that the population had never heard of it, could not grasp it, and wouldn’t want it if they could. It was a mere “Western idea”, they all explained, of no use to the common people. Then the documentary crew interviewed an old man, an elder in a tiny, remote, and impoverished village. After being told what the crew had heard from the others, he spoke patiently in slow, and thickly accented French. “Of course we know what democracy is,” he said. “What’s so difficult to understand? Do you think we’re so stupid that we can’t figure out that we’re being screwed?”
We must address the historical record with the same determined skepticism as that documentary crew. We should question the clichés formulated by those who benefit from injustice. One of the things that I learned, as a child, when I first read Frederick Douglas, was that there’s a great difference between what the slaves on a plantation think, and what their masters think they think.
To repeat a crucial point, thinking up ideas of justice and equality is not difficult. Achieving them is difficult. A long and painful historical experience has demonstrated that the most oppressed segments of society rarely improve their situation with rebellion alone. History is littered with failed peasant uprisings, which were either ruthlessly crushed, or where quickly hijacked by ideologists bent on installing themselves as a new aristocracy. The less common successes occurred when the idea of equality found its way into the hearts of many different “stakeholders”, including some who were not among the most desperate or oppressed. As with all complex problems, you are more likely to get a solution when it’s being examined by a variety of people with a variety of perspectives and a variety of skills.
What made the Enlightenment a remarkable period was not that ideas of equality, rights, and democracy were being invented for the first time, but that they were being argued and written about by a greater number and variety of people, with more time and resources to explore them philosophically, including some people who lived in comfort and privilege. Western European and North American society had grown so economically complex that there was room to have people who were educated and leisured, but not committed by self-interest to the idea of inequality. It became possible for a landed gentleman, who grew up on a slave plantation, to question the morality of slavery (at least theoretically). It became possible for a petty aristocrat or a country squire to toy with the idea that his crofters might be his equals. More important still, some places had a large number of literate people of humble origins, but comfortable means. They provided a paying audience for self-made writers and artists. An intelligent apprentice corset-maker, such as Thomas Paine, could run off to London, educate himself from pamphlets, books, and coffeehouse chatter, and turn himself into an famous intellectual. A woman like Mary Wollstonecraft, who began by eking out a living as a children’s tutor and governess, could do the same [8]. Amsterdam could turn any penniless refugee into a successful painter, a scribbler of seditious pornographic novels, or a philosopher. And some places, such as New England villages, had already enough experience of decentralized and egalitarian democracy to enable a smith or a cowherd to publish essays on metaphysics in the local journal.
The discussions that took place among the philosophes were both more intricate and more extensive than anyone would guess from merely reading a handful of works earmarked by posterity as “important” ones. Our education gives us the impression that it was a discussion taking place among a few dozen people, like some arcane debate about the relative merits of a high-order global states interpretation and a heterophenomenological interpretation of the global neuronal workspace model of consciousness, taking place in a modern university. This was far from the case. The Enlightenment was a vast and polyglot discussion between tens of thousands of people. Village curés, linen wholesalers, and petty bureaucrats earnestly debated issues of representative government, the proper role of the Estates, the nature of man, equality and inequality, fiscal policy, and liberty. This was a state of affairs that held true for two centuries, or more. The works that were widely discussed and influential were not necessarily those that have come down to us as the important ones Thinkers like Beccaria, Grotius, Servan, and Gassendi loomed much larger than the present taste suggests. Some names have been inflated retrospectively because they appealed to later generations. Rousseau may have had a “pop star” vogue among many aristocrats, precisely because of his personal eccentricity and because his ideas were patently impractical. But he seems to have had little influence on the sober men who rebelled against tyranny in the real world. The idea of the “social contract” was commonplace long before Rousseau, and it’s doubtful that his rather bizarre version of it was central to any historical events.
The philosophical side of the Enlightenment was not a leisurely debate between a handful of philosophers. It was a raucous, many-sided, free-for-all discussion, among a diverse and cosmopolitan population. While it took place in a primarily “Christian” sphere, that sphere contained such an extreme diversity of interpretations of Christianity that it’s meaningless to speak of it as being shaped or limited by specifically Christian doctrines.
This brings us to the second questionable assumption, which is that the developing democratic ideas of the Enlightenment were an exclusively European event that occurred in isolation from the rest of the world, as a self-contained development of European culture. This idea still remains a very strong one, and underlies both the trendy notion of a “clash of civilizations” and the cliché that democracy is a “Western idea”.
But this is an entirely fallacious view of how the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment came into being.
The Christian doctrine of Western Europe, at the dawn of the Enlightenment. was already the product of an intense interplay between Christianity and Islam. Post-Classical Western Europe, in its earliest phase, was far too poor and backward to have much in the way of science or sophisticated philosophy. For centuries, Christian thought west of Byzantium was dominated by hagiography, the fixing of rituals, and the retelling of miracles. Outside of Italy, there were few towns, and the largest of them would have been dwarfed by the great Muslim cities. The Islamic world was overwhelmingly richer in science, medicine, art, literature, technology, and hard cash. A single library in a middle-sized Muslim town would have had more books than the entirety of Western Christendom. [9]
When this backward area developed itself sufficiently to engage the Muslim world (in the form of the Crusades and the Reconquista) the result was that Muslim learning, Muslim science, and Muslim consumer products swept over Western Europe like an avalanche. The traffic was pretty much on a one-way street. Europe had little it could give in return. In the intellectual sphere, this meant the absorption of Muslim learning, including the Greek knowledge that Islam had absorbed and elaborated. By the end of the middle ages, the official theology of the Catholic Church was a body of reasoning and argument that had been borrowed directly from Islamic theology. In many cases, complex works had been duplicated point-for-point.
What thrilled the Christian scholars who devoured Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina, apart from the new knowledge, was that at last they were exposed to a high level of reasoning. Save for a few shreds of old Roman philosophy, their culture did not have access to much disciplined, reasoned thought, and had not placed a great value on logic. Sympathetic magic, miracles, parables and parallels to biblical stories were the stuff of serious thought. Solving a concrete problem by Ijtehad was not the preferred approach. Before Western Christianity could even begin to address serious issues, it had to undergo a complete overhaul by exposure to Islam.
This was not a one-time event. In the first phase, Europe transformed itself by opening itself up to the Islamic world, and the Classical and Hebraic heritage that the Islamic world had inherited and extended. In the next phase, Europe was to transform itself by opening itself up to the rest of the world, with a special emphasis on India.
The Age of Exploration is thought of, today, in terms of the discovery of the Western Hemisphere. That adventure led to European conquests and expansion into a huge area. However, in the beginning, the New World was just a side-show to Europe’s main focus. Europeans had a desperate desire to gain access to the wealthy civilizations of the East. It would be centuries before Europeans would be able to have any serious military, economic, or cultural impact on these civilizations. In the meantime, their efforts would have to be confined to shopping, or when that was not viable, piracy. Western Europe did have some products and ideas that made their way eastward, but, as with the interaction with Islam a few centuries before, the traffic was mostly one way. Along with the luxury goods and technical innovations, they absorbed new religious and philosophical ideas.
The debates of the Enlightenment took place in a society that was being bombarded by new experiences. Every European traveler brought back information from another exotic locale. By the 17th Century, the initial adventurous voyages of discovery had been replaced by elaborate diplomatic and trade arrangements. Keen European observers were flooding the reading public, back home, with detailed descriptions of folk customs, religious practice, politics, art, and literature from around the globe. The audience for these wonders was huge, and apparently insatiable.
When Enlightenment thinkers engaged in debate on philosophical, religious, scientific, or aesthetic issues, they did so in a global, not a purely European or Christian context. This is an aspect of the Enlightenment that most modern readers either underestimate, or miss entirely.
Let’s look at a work that had an big influence on European thought for more than a century after its publication, at the end of the 17th Century. It was called Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy. The first volume of this massive work was written by a rather shadowy Genoese named Giovanni Paolo Marana, apparently while in prison. Seven subsequent volumes were added by English authors, the last one possibly being Daniel Defoe. It was very, very popular. It was reissued 37 times, and available in Italian, French, German, English and Russian. It triggered numerous imitations, amongst them Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes.
Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy is a fictional compilation of letters from an imaginary Ottoman spy operating in Paris. It’s a fairly sophisticated political thriller. The hero, Mahmut, experiences the siege of Vienna from the Turkish viewpoint, and sends intelligence dispatches from European courts to the Sublime Porte. The book contains lengthy ruminations on Mahmut’s loneliness and alienation, as a devout Muslim living secretly among Christians. Mahmut struggles with a failed marriage to a Greek woman. He indulges in acerbic discussions of comparative religion. Much thought is devoted to Deism, Epicurianism, and to a Muslim Neoplatonist sect from Abbasid Iraq called the Brethren of Sincerity [Ikhwan al-Safa (االصف اخوان) ]. The book’s picture of Muslim life is sympathetic and, much more accurate than you would expect. As Mahmut systematically examines many religious faiths, he comes to the conclusion that, if arbitrary customs and localisms were cleared away, then unifying principles might be found. Among such principles he selects the Golden Rule (“the Fundamental Law of Nature, the Original Justice of the World”), a psychology of “universal sympathy”, and vegetarianism, which he feels is implicit in the Jewish and Muslim traditions of kosher and halal, in Pythagoreanism, and most explicitly in Brahmanic ahimsa. In one charming passage, he challenges Descartes and Hobbes, who insisted that animals had neither feelings nor rights because they could not speak. Mahmut declares that “I contract familiarities with the harmless animals. I study like a Lover to oblige and win their hearts, by all the tender offices I can perform… then when we once begin to understand each other aright, they make me a thousand sweet returns of gratitude according to their kind” [10] .
Works exhibiting such sentiments, and drawing on a broad cross-cultural experience, were quite common during the period. They reflected a public exhaustion and disenchantment with the brutal religious conflicts that had torn Europe apart. The journey towards toleration, secularism, and abstract Deism began with a number of works, published in Holland, which criticized the validity of miracles and witchcraft. The comparative study of world religions, and the attempt to find underlying principles for them, was the next step, as exemplified by this popular work. And this process cannot logically be called Eurocentric.
Now let’s look at a second work, which had a similar popularity during the Enlightenment. This was François Bernier’s Travels in the Mogul Empire AD 1656–1668. [11] . Bernier worked as a physician in the service of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb. His book was highly critical of Indian society, but mostly because he felt it suffered from the same irrational beliefs that plagued Christians in Europe. But he was impressed by ahimsa, the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, and the Brahmanic diet. He felt that all three contributed to a respect for life and a reduction of cruelty. This theme would subsequently recur in European and North American thought. Future generations would repeatedly look to India for some sort of wisdom, whether rational or occult. Today’s “New Age” beliefs are linear descendants of Bernier’s commentaries. Between then and now, one notes such tell-tale signposts as the “Boston Brahmins” and the Transcendentalists, and the disciples of Madame Blavatsky and Gurdjief.
Bernier was no isolated crank. He was the pupil and intimate friend of the philosopher-mathematician Pierre Gassendi, who debated with Descartes on the issues of empiricism and the nature of animals (which he would not dismiss, as did Descartes, as “machines”). Gassendi has been pooh-poohed by most twentieth century scholars, but his influence on the Enlightenment was significant, particularly through Locke, Leibniz and Newton. A recent reappraisal may reverse his current lack of prestige [12]. Bernier was also a friend of John Locke, who drew on him as a source for comparative religion in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Under Bernier’s influence, Locke made a study of all available commentary on Hinduism.
No person is more emblematic of the era’s great leap of knowledge and insight than Isaac Newton. His discovery of the principle of universal gravitation, and his Principia Mathematica are considered by many to be the most important achievements of the human mind. But they were work of Newton’s youth. He spent the remainder of his life trying to absorb the religious scriptures and traditions of the world, hoping to reconstruct a putative “original religion”, of which he considered Christianity to be no more than one of many derivations.[13]
These three examples are typical of the skeptical, multi-cultural, and multi-religious atmosphere in which Enlightenment thinking flourished. It’s in that atmosphere, open to non-European influences, that debates about the proper relationship of human beings to the state, equality, and human rights (natural or otherwise) took place.
Long after the Enlightenment era, when some countries had developed a relatively successful degree of democratic institutions, many people began to ask why and how that success had come into being. Some just felt that it was a side-effect of technical progress and prosperity. Others felt that cause and effect ran the other way round. The most striking success had taken place in lands that were predominantly Christian, though their state institutions were secular. It was easy to jump to the conclusion that Christian doctrines must somehow have led to this outcome. But attempts to demonstrate this usually collapsed in confusion. Either democratic ideas were said to be inherent in Christian doctrine or practice, or democracy was seen as emerging from the attempts of dissidents and skeptics to free themselves from the constraints of Christian customs and doctrine. While these two views are incompatible, they share the implicit assumption that the presence of Christianity is somehow necessary for the process to take place. Most interpretations, on examination, turn out to be jumbles of specious causation jumping back and forth between the two implied directions, but always preserving the magical correspondence. This correspondence amounts to nothing more than “I was wearing a blue hat when I won the lottery, therefore people who want to win the lottery should wear a blue hat”
The connection between articles of religious faith, especially in the form of abstract theological precepts, and what people do in practical situations, has never been obvious. Pacifism, for instance, is a pretty straightforward tenet of Christianity, recognized by most Christians as central to the teaching of Christ. Yet how much pacifist behaviour has Christianity generated? Only a handful of microscopic sects have practiced it, and they have generally suffered persecution in the “Christian” world. How many Buddhists actually make any effort to follow the Eightfold Path? Even if a particular religion can be shown to have some abstract principle that supports democratic theory, it does not follow that the people of that faith are bound to act democratically.
Democracy is something that people do. It’s a practical approach to solving concrete problems. It’s evolution can best be “explained” in terms of the nature of the problems, and the opportunities that opened up to improvise their solutions. The idea of democracy can be connected to certain abstract principles — natural rights, human equality, the worth of individual human beings — but these are not specifically religious principles, and specific faiths connect to them only in the general sense that any faith can be made to connect to them. Western European and North American societies made some notable advances in democracy, not because they were Christian, but because they were diverse and multifaceted societies exposed to a multiplicity of ideas. Diversity is the mother of invention. I applaud attempts to interpret Islam as consistent with democratic practice, because I applaud anyone’s attempts to make any aspect of their lives consistent with democratic practice. But the exercise is not necessary, except in the sense that it may ultimately lead to people seeing the issue in the non-religious, and non-ethnic framework that it properly inhabits.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Jillani, Tassaduq Hussain. Democracy and Islam: An Odyssey in Braving the Twenty-First Century. Brigham Young University Law Review. 2006.
[2] ‘Abbās Maḥmūd al-‘Aqqād (1889–1964) quoted in above
عباس محمود العقاد
[3] Jillani had previously discussed this at length in the Pakistan Daily Times, Nov.9, 2005: Pluralism and Tolerance in Islam
[4] The True Levellers Standard Advanced: or, the State of Community opened and Presented to the Sons of Men. London. 1649. Renaissance Editions, an Online Repository of Works Printed in English Between the Years 1477 and 1799. University of Oregon. http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/%7Erbear/ren.htm
[5] Overton, Richard. An Arrow Against All Tyrants. The Rota, Essex. 1976. Reprint of the 1646 ed.
[6] Documents from The English Levellers (Cambridge UP. 1998) are maintained online by the Constitution Society. http://www.constitution.org/lev/levellers.htm.
[7] Dobson, R. B. — The Peasants revolt of 1381. 1970, p.373–375, quotes the passage from from Thomas Walsingham’s Historia Anglicana
[8] Steve Muhlberger (Nipissing University) suggested Wollstonecraft while perusing a draft of this article.
[9] The size of the libraries of the great Abbasid and Umayyad cities is well-documented:
“the libraries of Moorish Spain contained close to a million manuscripts…in Cordoba books were more eagerly sought than beautiful concubines or jewels…the city’s glory was the Great Library established by Al-HakamII…ultimately it contained 400,000 volumes” Erdoes,Richard “1000 AD” .Berkley. 1998 p.60–6.
see also
Christ, Karl. The Handbook of Medieval Library History. Metuchen NJ. Scarecrow Press. 1984. p. 172
Saunders. J. J. History of Medieval Spain . NY. Routledge.1993. p.167;
Sordo, Enrique, Moorish Spain .Toronto. Ryerson. 1963. p.55;
Titley, Noram M. “Islam” in The Book Through 5000 Years ed. H. Vervliet . NY. Phaidon.1985. p.52;
Muslim libraries were systematically cataloged, and books were labeled with publication data, provenance, and a certification that the copyist had been trained:
C. Prince, ‘The Historical Context of Arabic Translation, Learning, and The Libraries of Medieval Andalusia’, Library History, v. 18, July 2002, p. 73–87.
But there were substantial libraries in many lesser centers. Mashad, in Iran, preserves one of the few such that survived the Mongol invasion, the Library of Astan Quds Razavi, in continuous existence since 973 A.D. (363 A. H.) which preserves 32,485 rare manuscripts, including 17,240 early items, going back to the 10th century.
For a remarkable description of libraries, collections, and the book trade dating from Almoravid times, in the far-from central region of Mauritania, see:
Moussa Ould Ebno. The Treasures in Mauritani’s Dunes. UNESCO Courier. 2000. http://www.unesco.org/courier/2000_12/uk/doss4.htm ;
and Louis Werner. Mauritania’s Manuscripts. Saudi Aramco World. Nov-Dec 2003.
The small oasis town of Chinguetti, a minor trade center in Almoravid times, has been selected by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site because of its extraordinary libraries, where thousands of medieval books are preserved. A complete tenth-century edition of Ibn Rushd has recently been uncovered in an even smaller village.
The descriptions of Mauritania’s libraries and private collection resembles my own personal experience of Timbuktu.
The Muslim world published books on paper, which was manufactured on an industrial scale, especially in Baghdad. Europe was restricted to vellum parchment until it started to import paper from Damascus, during the crusades. It is not known to have been manufactured in Europe until 1400. Vellum (made from calf-skin) or sheepskin parchment required the hides of dozens, sometimes hundreds of slaughtered animals to produce a single book. At these costs, books could only be a rare luxury, and Western European libraries did not exceed hundreds, or in some cases, a few thousand books.
[10] Giovanni Paolo Marana. Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy selected and edited by Arthur J. Weitzman. London. 1970; Tristram Stuart’s The Bloodless Revolution . Norton. New York. 2007. led me to this passage.
[11] My local library [Metro Toronto Central Reference] has two editions of the same translation, one edited by Archibald Constable, the other under the title Aurangzeb in Kashmir : travels in the Mughal Empire, edited by D. C. Sharma; again, Tristram Stuart’s book led me to them.
[12] Antonia LoLordo. Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy. Cambridge . 2006
[13 Newton’s massive body of religious, historical, and anthropological writing, long unpublished, is now being made available online by the Newton Project.
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