Has the Muslim world ever used civil disobedience as a means for social change?
I was going to post this in GQ, but my follow up question is more GD.
If no, why not?
What Muslim world - Arabia, the African countries, Turkey?
What period of history - the last 100 years, or the last 1500 years?
Civil disobedience - do you mean like Martin Luther King or Gandhi? Because, I’m sure you know, that’s not possible under a despotic or absolute ruler (why didn’t the American revolutanieres try that instead of armed rebellion?) And I’m sure you remember that for most of history, in most countries on Earth, there wasn’t a democracy around to try civil disobedience in.
If the Palestinians had used Gandhi-King-esque tactics starting in 1948, they’d have probably had a strong thriving homeland by the mid-1950s. If the Jews in Palestine/Israel had used them before the Arab opposition, well… there’d be even fewer Jews in the world.
Any country, any culture, any time … ever. I purposely left it an open ended question.
The thing is, I can’t think of a single Muslim culture that has used non-violence as means for change succesfully. But I have to be forgetting something. We can’t just write it off to despotism. Islam doesn’t have to be despotic, and civil disobedience can work in non-democratic nations - provided they’re not despotic. It’s hard for me to believe that Islam and civil-disobedience are mutually exclusive. Surely they can’t be. I want examples as to why not.
So, let’s go back to the GQ aspect of my question. Has any Isalmic society, at anywhere and at any time, ever successfully used civil disobedience?
This article talks about what the author consider some examples. Frankly I find some of those to be pretty equivocal. But large-scale peaceful civil disobediance has been pretty damn rare in general. It’s one of the reasons the Indian example is so extraordinary.
http://www.warresisters.org/nva0102-1.htm
- Tamerlane
Yes - besides Gandhi and Martin Luther King, how many western societies have tried civil disobedience?
Gandhi as part of western society?
Denmark tried it during WWII.
Well, the folks living in the American Colonies tried Civil Disobedience before resorting to armed rebellion. They boycotted English goods, refused to drink tea, and were keen on smuggling goods in to prevent England from making any money. Then again there were the occasional tarring a feathering of tax collectors and threats against loyalist but it wasn’t as if war was the first thing they tried in the colonies.
Marc
This brings up an interesting point- what exactly constitutes civil disobedience? I’d argue to neither boycotts nor smuggling fit the bill. The former is an individual’s prerogative, whatever their motivation- the authorities can’t order you to consume more of a given commodity (or at least hadn’t in the examples cited).
The latter is just criminal behavior. It would be like arguing that all of those caught and tried for drug offenses were engaging in civil disobedience. Whether you agree with the law, there seem to be specific methods and motivations that separate civil disobedience from general lawlessness.
My guess is that when you deal with totalitarian dictatorships (rather than gentleman despots a la Britain), CD doesn’t work- if only because a truly smart dictator is adept at 1) selling his programs (an pogroms) as part of a greater good and 2) disappearing his opponents. Would CD have worked against Hitler?
What about the Muslim boycott of Danish goods? Wouldn’t you consider that to be civil disobedience?
Boycotts are a good start and are still used today against certain companies if the consumers are dissatisified with their behaviour or products.
Doesn’t the word “Boycott” come from a rich farmer in Ireland who mistreated his workers so badly that everybody boycotted him?
Not on a total scale. Gandhi was well aware of this, and that one reason his campaign worked at all was that the a free press reported about his activities, and that the English citizens were in favour of what he was doing, and so brought additional pressure to the govt.
Local demonstrations of citizens had some effect - the famous Rosenstrasse protest worked. But the protest of citizens against the killing of handicapped people only slowed the so-called “Euthanasia” or T4 program down; it continued less obviously:
A General strike - a boycott of the majority of the population - would have a strong effect on the government, regardless how despotic - even despots don’t want to kill all of their own subjects. (Killing foreigners and enemies is part of despotism). The difficultuy is in getting most of the population to agree and actually pull through.
That’s a misguided attempt, similar to the popular, but ineffective boycotts in western countries (boycott gasoline on one day, boycott the French for protesting against the Iraq war, etc.) Boycotting Danish goods because of one extremist newspaper is the wrong target, and therefore, will cause harm, but not a lot of good. (It’s similar to the leader of some Muslim countries telling the Danish govt. to apologize - the Danish govt. has no control over the newspapers.)