The Public Sphere in Muslim Societies

7. THE WAQF AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

CHAPTER SEVEN THE WAQF AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE MIRIAM HOEXTER Much of the discussion on whether Middle Eastern states have the necessary ingredients for the development of democracy has centered on the questions of civil society and the nature of relations between the state and society. The “Oriental despotism” thesis, long in vogue in the literature, saw these two questions as inseparable: the despotism that characterized the Oriental state precluded the existence of any autonomous organization or civil society; or as Turner put it, “The concept [of civil society] has been used as the basis of the notion that the Orient is, so to speak, all state and no society.”1 The absence of a civil society thus constituted the principal theoretical postulate of the “Oriental despotism” case, which, according to Turner, was “a reflection of basic political anxieties about the state of political freedom in the West.”2 By now, the existence of a plethora of civic associations in the Middle East, though not structured on the Western model, seems to be widely recognized.3 However, emphasizing the despotic nature of rulers, their lack of legitimacy, and their lack of concern for the welfare of the public, the predominating picture in the literature concerning the relations between state and society is that of a more or less total separation and estrangement of the two.4 I propose to challenge this rather unsatisfying picture by looking at the relations between rulers and society from the broader perspective suggested by the concept of the public sphere. The importance of this concept—defined as a zone of autonomous social activity between the family and the ruling authorities—lies largely in that it goes beyond appeals to the formal institutions of the Western civil society model, to address the entire realm of societal and cultural life that has relevance to the social and political order.5 It thus broadens the scope of discussion to include aspects that have hitherto been largely neglected, such as informal ties, the moral-ethical values that form a society’s image of the good order, and the symbols that reflect the common values and social ideals of the particular society.6 I shall look at the relations between society and its rulers through a particular prism—that of the Islamic endowment institution, the waqf. 119 Hodgson, in his discussion of the shari`a as a civic force, lists the waqf foundations, along with the shari`a laws and the Sufi (mystic) orders, as the three religiously sanctioned integrative institutions holding together all Islamic groupings in the town.7 Within this framework the waqf fulfilled a particular role: it became the vehicle for financing Islam as a society,8 or, as I prefer to formulate it: the waqf served as a major means through which the Islamic idea of the social order proper for the umma (the community of believers ) was implemented. Throughout the premodern Islamic world, endowments (waqfs) were made by rulers as well as by all strata of the Muslim population. They provided for the financing and maintenance of a host of public services and did so through an institution that, across the centuries, had retained its basic characteristic as an institution whose rules were an integral part of the shari`a—the sacred law.9 The waqf is thus an ideal prism through which to examine both the moral values underlying the Islamic perception of the public sphere and the ways they were put into practice. This chapter is divided into two parts. In the first I shall discuss some doctrinal points that I believe are relevant to the perception of the public sphere characteristic of the Islamic cultural area and their reflection in the waqf. In the second part, I shall examine the impact of the waqf on the formation of the public sphere and the nature of the discourse it generated. THE WAQF AND THE PERCEPTION OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE UMMA AND SHARI`A The central importance accorded in Islamic political discourse to the community of believers (the umma) is perhaps the most significant difference between the way Islamic culture and Western culture view the nature of the public sphere and the relationship between the rulers and society. The interests of the community of believers and the norms that should guide the lives of individuals and the community were the main concerns of Muhammad. After his death, public life was, to a large extent, posited as the collective responsibility of the umma. The Qur...