Stupid Peasants and Stubborn Muslims

By Greg Noakes

The future course of Islam and the worldwide Islamic community is a matter of great interest and importance to many. For some observers, Islam is the antagonist in a future "clash of civilizations," while other analysts see the "Islamic resurgence" as a case of Islam reassuming its proper place on the world stage. Islam's future is most important, of course, for that fifth of humanity which is Muslim, but the issue goes beyond the borders of the Muslim world.

There has been no shortage of prognostication about Islam, but many of these predictions and analyses are flawed because they focus solely on political and economic elites. Scholars, analysts and policymakers pore over the writings of an Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, dissect the speeches of a Hosni Mubarak, examine the pronouncements of a Hassan al-Turabi and analyze the campaign promises of a Benazir Bhutto. Most works of Islamic history are elite history, concerned with the rise and fall of dynasties, focused on the development of various intellectual movements and infected with the notion that "great men" alone chart the course of history. Contemporary political analysis of the Middle East is little different.

There are good reasons for this approach. Elites control most of the wealth, shape the political systems and move the levers of power in their states and societies. Yet what is lacking is recognition of the role played by the vast majority of the Muslim world's population, the "little men" who provide both continuity and stability and produce what could be termed the "inertia of the faithful."

"The Stupid Peasant"

During the heyday of "modernization theory" in the decades following World War II, scholars and technocrats referred to the "stupid peasant," the object of modernization who was so dim-witted and whose horizons were so circumscribed that he or she failed to understand the benefits of agricultural development. The peasant resisted adoption of new crop rotation systems, chemical fertilizers and insecticides, and genetically altered seed strains. The stubborn peasant was an obstacle in the road to modernity, and had to be moved at any cost.

What the 1970s and '80s demonstrated, however, was that the "stupid peasant" was actually a "clever peasant," who turned out to be the custodian of decades—if not centuries—of indigenous wisdom and knowledge of the local environment. There were good reasons why traditional agricultural methods evolved as they did, development theorists realized, and these techniques generally struck a delicate balance between productivity and sustainability.

By moving the peasant and his or her knowledge out of the way, modernization "experts" had achieved great boosts in productivity, but at the expense of sustainability. Agricultural yields and herd sizes mushroomed, but the desertification of Africa's Sahel, deforestation in Latin America, and soil erosion and water resource depletion around the world testify to the awesome cost.

Western academics have documented and analyzed, in minute detail, the effects of over-cultivation and excessive grazing on the southern fringe of the Sahara, but a simple Sahelian tribesman still said it best: "The land is tired. The land is dead." Contemporary development experts now try to incorporate indigenous techniques and "folk wisdom" into their plans. The "stupid peasant" has a role to play after all.

"The Stubborn Muslim"

The masses of ordinary Muslims, a billion of them stretched from Morocco to Mindanao, share many of the same traits as the "stupid peasant." They can be stubborn to the point of exasperation, they are resistant to change, and at times it appears to non-Muslims and Muslim elites that they have little sense of what is in their own best interest. Yet like the peasant, the ordinary and often poorly educated Muslim is seldom deluded by grandiose notions and is in fact wise beyond words. It is the ordinary Muslim, who may know the entire Qur'an by heart and yet be unable to sign his or her own name, who has ensured the survival of Islamic civilization and tradition through 1,400 years of both success and defeat.

Time and again in Islamic history it is the "inertia of the faithful" that has saved Islam from the good-and ill-intentioned plans of its rulers and would-be rulers. From its earliest years, Islam recognized the value of the community and of community opinion. "My community will never agree in error," the Prophet Muhammad is reported to have said. Islam has no clergy; the prince and peasant may each lead prayers, and there is no religious official or group of officials who unilaterally determines Muslim doctrine and dogma. Each individual is responsible for his or her own conduct in light of his or her knowledge of the Qur'an and the sunna, or example, of the Prophet. Each person sets his own course, and Muslims believe each will be held accountable for that course, whatever his station in life.

Most works of Islamic history are infected with the notion that "great men" alone chart the course of history.

During the medieval period, Muslim elites were torn for centuries by divisive debates over theological issues like the createdness or uncreatedness of the Qur'an and anthropomorphic references to God in the Holy Book. Other debates focused on the permissibility and place of Aristotelian philosophy in Islamic intellectual endeavors. These debates were far from academic; they produced some of the darker moments of Islamic history, spawning division, persecution and sometimes oppression. These rather esoteric issues threatened the fragile unity of Islam.

Yet they had little effect on most Muslims of the time who, with their single-minded insistence on the five pillars of Islam—profession of the faith, prayer, fasting, alms and pilgrimage—kept the more arcane debates in their proper perspective. Whether a Qur'anic reference to the Hand of God means He literally has a hand or not had no impact on the simple Muslim's faith in God and His Prophet. In the end, when the debates were resolved or simply forgotten, it was the "inertia of the faithful" which had kept the Islamic community intact.

In recent decades, various politicians in the Middle East have raised the banners of socialism, communism or pan-Arab nationalism. They bewitched some, and occasionally inspired great passion among their followers. Yet their success was transitory, and they were never able to attract a majority (or even a plurality) of the worldwide Muslim umma, or community.

Perhaps the Arab world's greatest political figure of this century was the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser, who rallied millions with his Arab nationalist rhetoric and his defiance vis-â-vis Israel and the West. Despite his success in the 1950s and '60s, a generation later Nasser's language rings hollow in the Arab world. Yet even at the height of his popularity, the vast majority of Muslims—fewer than a fourth of whom are Arabs—remained unswayed by Nasser's sweeping vision of the Arab future. The Egyptian leader failed to move the great skeptical mass of Muslims.

Saddam Hussain enjoyed similar fleeting success during the Gulf war when he cloaked his Ba'thist ideology with Islamic terminology and appeals, but again his popular support was ephemeral and limited. Muslims around the world are saddened by the current plight of the Iraqi people, but few will shed tears over the ultimate demise of Saddam, the most disastrous political figure the Arab world has produced in this century.

Contemporary Islamists rejoice at the ultimate failure of Nasser, the late Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and former Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba to sway the Muslim faithful to their socialist, nationalist or secularist projects and visions, but they should not overestimate their own success. This is particularly true for the fringe groups committed to violence. The leftist Arab terrorists of the 1960s and '70s passed from the scene with nothing to show for their efforts but pointless death and suffering. There is no reason to believe the Islamist terrorists of the 1990s will be any more successful, since their acts of devastation stand in such blatant contradiction to the deepest values of the overwhelming majority of Muslims.

Even the mainstream Islamist movements must understand that they have to pass the muster of their fellow Muslims. Like their theologian and philosopher predecessors, they will discover that unless their priorities are in order and they address the issues of greatest concern to Muslims as a whole, they will cease to be relevant. If Islamists focus their attention solely on dress codes and single-sex classrooms rather than trying to stem the moral, educational and socio-economic decay in their societies, they will find themselves isolated. The farther these movements stray from core Islamic values, the more desperate their isolation. Islamic history is littered with movements which set out in search of a "bold new future" for Islam, only to find there were no Muslims following behind them. It can happen again.

Who knows more about Islam in its truest sense of "submission to God": the scholar with degrees from Al-Azhar and Oxford or the Egyptian farmer, the Nigerian herdsman and the Pakistani shopkeeper living on the margins, subject to the full impact of life's vicissitudes? Some Muslims lack the ability, and many others the opportunity, to express their hopes, fears and values to others. Individually they may be undistinguished, but taken together they are the life-blood of Islam, and as such their value is difficult to overestimate.

This doesn't mean Middle East analysts should ignore political and economic elites. By their nature these groups exercise an influence over state and society far in excess of their numbers. Yet these elite groups should recognize that their visions will not come to fruition until they convince the other more numerous and more skeptical members of the billion-strong Muslim community of the wisdom, viability and legitimacy of their views and proposals. The "stubborn Muslim" is not impervious to change, but he will accept it only on his own terms and only so far as it meets his standards of propriety and adherence to Islam. Recognition of that fact would provide both Muslim elites and non-Muslim analysts with a more accurate forecast of the Islamic future.

Greg Noakes, an American Muslim, is the news editor of the Washington Report.