|
 akers
of states and givers of laws stood at the top of the old-fashioned
hierarchies of greatness. To conditores imperiorum —
creators of commonwealths — was given the highest fame, whether
they were legendary figures like Romulus, or real men like Washington
and Franklin, Hamilton and Jefferson, Madison and Adams. The great
lawgivers came next in the pyramid: legislatores such as
Lycurgus, Solon, Justinian, and John Marshall.
What opportunities
exist for that kind of greatness today? In the West, very few, for
the heroic foundation-laying work has been completed. There does,
of course, continue to arise, every half-century or so, the need
for what the old-fashioned connoisseurs of greatness called patres
patriae and salvatores imperii, fathers and saviors of
their country: Lincoln and Churchill, for example, or F.D.R. and
Reagan. But for revolutionary, state-making greatness, there is
little need, in this part of the world; the machinery now in place
works.
How different the situation in the East! Even before the events
of September 11, you could hear the history-making goddess's call,
bawling incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, on some
faintly audible Oriental frequency. Wanted: a great man — or
rather a generation of great men (and women), capable of rising
up in an Islamic state and demonstrating, in a concrete effort at
state-making, that the traditions of Islam are not incompatible
with individual liberty and private rights, or with the rule of
law and the legitimate forms of constitutionally-ordered government.
The precedents
are there, at least in theory. One supposes the State Department
has gathered up this theoretical material — the work of so
many Islamic Lockes and Muslim Montesquieus — and sent copies
to the conference on the future of Afghanistan now convened near
Bonn, to be distributed as background material for use by the Afghan
delegates. (Memo to Secretary of State Powell: If our diplomats
haven't yet done this, they ought to get the department's mimeograph
machines busy.) For this revolutionary material exists — the
work of quiet scholars laboring obscurely in various parts of the
Islamic world, thoughtful people who have attempted to show that
the traditions of Islam, properly interpreted, contain materials
from which a theory of democratic practice and a form of constitutional
government can plausibly be derived. Some of these efforts are more
convincing than others; but even if it could be conclusively shown
that all of them were far-fetched and overstrained, it would nevertheless
be in the American interest, and perhaps the interest of the Muslim
peoples as well, to subsidize them to the hilt.
When, in 1998,
I visited North Africa, I met people there who discussed the work
of these intellectuals with quiet enthusiasm and cautious hope.
I remember especially the story of a reclusive scholar in Cairo,
the master of a fastidious Arabic prose style, who published, in
the 1920s, a slim volume in which he argued that the traditions
of the despotic regimes were unfaithful to the teachings of the
Prophet. His work was denounced as heretical by the authorities
of Al-Azhar; it was said that the devil had dictated his words;
but even the imams were awed by the high grace of his learning.
His admirers liked to think of him as an Islamic Martin Luther,
one who struck a blow for freedoms that have too often been thwarted
through the despotic corruption of religion.
And yet, the
dreams of the intellectuals have borne no fruit: No statesman has
yet succeeded in translating their ideas into a practical political
program, or in making those ideas the basis of a functioning Islamic
state. There is little evidence that the liberal theories of these
philosophes are capable of inspiring the Muslim masses; and
even the bright students in the universities seem to be drawn, not
to the ideas of the indigenous Jefferson manqués,
but to those narrow and suicidal dogmas that have darkened the face
of Islamic learning.
Perhaps it
is not simply a want of great men with which we are here concerned;
conditions, too, conspire against the creation of a flourishing
form of Islamic freedom. We have heard much of these conditions
in recent weeks — have heard how poverty, primitive economic
conditions, and the absence of any practical experience of a liberal
society make the establishment of a new form of civil order unlikely
in the Islamic world, at least for the time being. (Turkey is an
anomalous bright spot on the otherwise grim horizon.) Islamic regimes
have rarely been sympathetic to modern ideals of individual liberty
and constitutional government; and when, in recent years, they have
drawn on the models of the modern West, they have generally gravitated
toward the most deplorable ones: the socialism Gamal Abdel Nasser
championed in Egypt, the one-party dictatorship adopted by the Baath
party in Iraq and in Syria, the fanatical nihilism which some have
detected in the ideals of the Islamic terrorists.
The Northern
Alliance fighters and tribal chieftains in Afghanistan promise to
be magnanimous, to engage in no vendettas, to break the cycle of
violence, and to deal justly with the criminals they apprehend;
they vow to address the question of political power, the reorganization
of the state, and the distribution of the spoils of war responsibly
and equitably. But they may simply be telling the war correspondents
what they think their sponsors in Washington and London want to
hear. Is it really likely that there is a nation-builder like George
Washington among the tribal warlords, jealous enough of fame, and
conscious enough of the judgment of posterity, to put the interests
of the whole ahead of those of a particular faction or tribe? Or
that, if such a prodigy indeed exists, he will find men of the caliber
of Adams and Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton — men whose honor
he can trust, and on whose competence he can rely?
It is unlikely
that we will see such a miracle in Kabul. We can supply the Afghan
chiefs with money and food, and with advice on the drafting of constitutions
and the calling of parliaments; we can fill the bookstores of Kandahar
and Kunduz with new editions of those Islamic Martin Luthers whose
work might serve to counter the fanatical visions of the reactionary
mullahs; we can even superintend, at a discreet distance, the compilation
and publication of a sort of Islamic Encyclopédie
devoted to the work of those Muslims who believe that Islam is not
incompatible with law and liberty, and whose blueprint for a liberal
and democratic Muslim state could serve as a Federalist Papers
for a new generation of Falasifah, as the Islamic philosophers
of the golden age were called. Above all, we can work to avoid making
the mistake of President Wilson, who failed to intersperse his homilies
on the virtues of a democratic order with advice phrased in an idiom
which regional nation-builders could understand — wisdom drawn
from their own ideals and traditions, and expressed in their own
languages and dialects. (It is precisely because so many Islamic
intellectuals have rejected the idea that the American Revolution
can serve as a model for their own struggles that a new, Islamic
version of a pamphlet like Common Sense is necessary —
a pamphlet composed, not by Englishmen or Americans, but by the
best of the liberal Islamic thinkers). We can do these things —
or see to it that they are done — but they are unlikely to
be enough. The odds against success are daunting.
Still, before
we surrender to a premature pessimism, we should remind ourselves
that, although the Founders of the American Republic possessed many
advantages that the men who will lead a new Afghanistan do not possess,
the efforts of the Americans, in the 1770s and 1780s, appeared —
at the time — almost as hopelessly quixotic. The American Founders
set themselves to take on the most powerful empire of the day; and
they sought, too, to impose an enduring republican political order
on a vast extent of territory and a large and heterogeneous mass
of people — something which all the experts of the time agreed
could not be done. The Americans defied the experts, and made history.
Can the tribal leaders and freedom fighters in Afghanistan —
helped, not hindered, by the money and arms and printing presses
of the most powerful nation of the day — do something similarly
audacious? Betting men would doubtless balk at the wager. And yet
what odds do you suppose the London bookies were giving George Washington
in 1776?
|
