A shared quest: Pluralism isn’t an accident that happens; deliberate
choices are required to build a modern society
Amyn Sajoo, Special to the Sun
Published: Friday, November 17, 2006
There was a smug naivete to how most of us saw the world at the end of
the Cold War.
Gone was the dogma of East-West conflict, with its nuclear baggage;
what lay ahead was “our” kind of democratic peace. The world would
learn to be “modern” — celebrating secular and materialist values
that prized individual liberty.
The delusion lasted barely a year before ethno-political clashes broke
out from ex-Yugoslavia and Soviet Central Asia to Africa, Asia and the
Middle East. Bottled in an East-West dualism, the cumulative
injustices of the Cold War years were uncorked. Touting the virtues of
U.S.-style democracy cut no ice.
In ex-Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan,
Chechnya and Afghanistan, there were old scores to settle. In Kashmir
and Palestine, as in Northern Ireland, the legacy was of colonial
partitions that too many found grossly unfair. For social and
political anger, religion became an outlet.
What these conflicts — together with Iraq under Saddam Hussein — had
in common was the failure of a vital feature of democratic culture:
The capacity to turn diversity into shared citizenship and civil society.
All this is worth recalling as Canada partners with the Aga Khan on a
remarkable civic venture — a Global Centre for Pluralism based in
Ottawa. Many Canadians know the Aga Khan as the leader of 80,000
Ismaili Canadian Muslims, part of a worldwide community of some 20
million. Ismailis have known firsthand the price of those
ethno-political upheavals, notably in Idi Amin’s Uganda from where
many fled to Canada, as well as in Afghanistan and Tajikistan.
“The rejection of pluralism is pervasive across the globe and plays a
significant role in breeding destructive conflicts,” the Aga Khan told
Prime Minister Stephen Harper at the centre’s opening last month. And
he matched the $30 million invested by Canada to do something about
the trend.
With the incivilities unleashed by Sept. 11 and the “War on Terror,”
no faith tradition has been more vilified than Islam. Danish
newspapers and their cohorts on both sides of the Atlantic deem it
fair to run cartoon contests pinning the blame for terrorist acts on
the Prophet Muhammad — like those graphic Nazi depictions of Jews as
the root of all evil. It’s not rocket science predicting what happens
when minorities are treated as repositories of such impulses.
Again, consider the quality of the recent Canadian “debate” around the
issue of whether to allow Shari’a-based arbitration in Ontario. This
could have been a civil conversation about faith-based arbitral
processes and their interface with the Canadian Charter of Rights and
Freedoms. The public may then have discovered that the Shari’a isn’t a
body of law but of ethics, from which are derived secular legal tenets
that have always been fluid.
Instead, armed with slogans about Islamic theocracies, a yelling lobby
appropriated for itself the defence of rights in the name of secular
“enlightenment. ” So much for freedom of conscience and choice. Nothing
debases pluralism as much as ignorance.
There was a time not long ago in our relationship with first nations,
Asians, blacks, even East Europeans, when the best we could expect was
a passive tolerance, a “letting them be.” If that was all
multiculturalism aimed to correct, it’s no surprise that we seemed to
be creating ethno-cultural ghettos. But we have come a long way.
Pluralist engagement is in evidence in Canadian writing, the arts and
architecture, in schools, hospitals, courts, and local government. We
have much ground to cover in the news media, universities, the federal
government and policy think-tanks that inform public governance. Yet
the world can learn from Canada.
The upshot is to reinforce the Aga Khan’s observation that pluralism
isn’t an “accident” that happens because we are culturally diverse,
wealthy or spacious.
Those qualities have not quite delivered the goods elsewhere.
Deliberate choices are required, built around a willingness to harness
multiple social and political preferences in a shared quest we call
modernity.
Or rather, modernities. Societies and individuals not only have
diverse values but also multiple routes to advancing them. We may
choose to damn those we disapprove of with labels that amount to
calling them “anti-modern. ” It gives us the satisfaction of seeing one
brand — secular, individualist, technological — as the rational choice.
Then again, we could recognize what democratic legitimacy means: that
there are multiple modernities, at home and abroad. It might help us
understand why forcibly exporting one brand to Iraq has reaped a
whirlwind.
Let’s not forget that the West once thought it could do likewise in
India, Egypt, and Vietnam — not to mention earlier dreams about China.
A “clash of civilizations” isn’t the cause of failing to engage with
alternative modernities, but it could become the outcome.
Amyn B. Sajoo lectures at Simon Fraser University. He is a former
policy adviser with the Canadian Human Rights Commission, and the
editor of Civil Society in the Muslim World (2002).
Vancouver Sun
Ismailimail 