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| Muslims Don’t Go ‘Bowling Alone’: a New Paradigm for Thinking about Citizenship and Civil SocietySom |
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While western conceptions of citizenship can be traced back to Greek antiquity today's conceptions of citizenship and civil society really began much later as a result of the problems of modernity, unforeseen by the architects of the tiny city state model. For example, the refinement of different skills and the commercial specialisation of modern states presented a problem to the Scottish theorist, Adam Fergusson, who feared the 'mildness of manners' that are a product of civil society would weaken the vigour of society. One of the things that concerned him in his extended 'Essay on the History of Civil Society', 1767, was the weakening effect of a professional army on civic virtue and republicanism. Today the main concern for western democracies is how citizens can maintain a level of connectedness in order to address the huge technological and propaganda power of modern states. While most citizens are in practice at the furthest margins of government their involvement is made possible by the existence of what Hegel viewed as a sphere of life between private interest and the state that he called civil society. Robert Putnam's enumeration of secondary and tertiary associations mentioned earlier all fall within this sphere of civil society. This concept is of great importance to the keeping alive of some form of citizen participation in modern democracies and the fostering of collective civic virtues that are at risk because of the increasingly individual nature of modern living in the west.
The modern concept of civil society is therefore quite specific to the interests of western democracies, though it overlaps with the broader concepts of citizenship and civic virtue that concern all political philosophies including Islamic political philosophy. It is often assumed that importing the western notion of civil society into the Muslim world will promote democracy and the overthrow of totalitarian regimes. The writings of Vaclav Havel and Antonio Gramsci, who died in one of Mussolini's prisons, with regards to the use of civil society as a tool of opposition to communism and fascism are examples of such thinking, and indeed the fall of the Soviet Union is often credited in part to the existence of extra-state networks, including the Catholic church, that provided a medium for cultural opposition to totalitarianism. It is the role of civil society in the overthrow of communism that sparked a renewal of western interest in the subject after it had fallen into neglect.
Muslims today keenly feel the problem of totalitarianism in the Middle East; oppressive regimes exert control through restricting associations, both political and cultural, that are seen as subversive. In addition to underground political activity the civic virtues of Islam and the qualities of family and social interaction are a persistent factor of resistance against tyranny. Such elements of what might be called civil society will not, however, automatically support democracy. They are a medium allowing the association of people and the propagation of ideas independently of state control, but the result depends upon the ideas that the people aspire to. In the Middle East the word democracy is a common slogan that means to many no more than freedom from the existing tyranny; the ideological aspirations of the people, however, may lie elsewhere. To the extent that democracy is about the people ruling, then democracy does depend upon civil society in the Hegelian sense, but the reverse does not necessarily follow, as civil society is also a medium for competing, non-democratic, political ideologies to take hold.
Some of the discussions of civil society, especially the orientalist ones, tend to focus on the structures of civil society to the detriment of its actual functions. In so doing the existence of civil society in hitherto underestimated forms can be overlooked. The family, for example, has a much more extended and interconnected character in Muslim societies than in the west, which means that the potential social capital that can be found within, and between, Muslim families can be far greater than in the west. The study of Islam would benefit from the involvement of more creative political thinkers and western nations are poorly served by sole reliance upon orientalists.
Islamic political and associational life may shed new light on existing western discussions of subjects such as citizenship, civil society and social capital. Classical Islamic political thought, rather than being overlooked or hammered by orientalists into a partial fit with democracy, could even provide a new paradigm for political theorists interested in long standing questions of human political life.
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