Fatima.Mernessi_The-Forgotten-Queens-of-Islam-EN

34 Queens and Courtesans
directly transmit any divine mission to them. And Islam's essential
institution, the caliphate, leaves no doubt about this exclusion of
women from politics. If Benazir Bhutto's enemies had taken their
stand on the level of principles and had specified that they were
only speaking about the function of caliph, inaccessible to a woman,
they would have been unassailable. But the problem is that Zia al-
Haq was not caliph either, despite his religious pretensions and his
brandishing of the shari'a to hide the arbitrariness of his military
regime. What the fundamentalists in fact blamed Benazir Bhutto
for was winning the election. Normally good Muslims who want to
hold to the letter of Islamic tradition should not participate in
popular elections with universal suffrage because elections are completely
foreign to the spirit and tradition of the choice of the leader
by bay'a:
Bay'a is the solemn commitment that one makes to obey. He who
makes this promise pledges to his prince that he gives up the right
to decide his personal affairs and those of the Muslims, that he will
raise no challenge thereto, that he will obey everything that he is
commanded to do, whether he likes it or not. 19
Bay'a has nothing to do with elections with universal suffrage
because it contradicts them on two basic levels. The first is that
bay'a is final, while the vote with universal suffrage is temporary
and renewable at regular intervals. The second is that bay'a is the
privilege of the notables, of those who already have a part in
decision-making, ahl al-hal wa al-'aqd (literally, those who have the
ability to tie and untie). Another word for the elite is ahl al-ikhtiyar
(those who choose). Never at any moment in Muslim history was
there an attempt to involve everybody, to include the 'amma, the
people.
The word 'amma, the common people, must not be confused
with umma, whose origin is umm (mother) and which means the
community of the faithful. Both words refer to the body of the
faithful, but while umma is a very positive concept, 'amma is an
extremely pejorative concept. The 'amma is the uncultivated mass,
ignorant and undisciplined by nature; being incapable of reflection
or reason, it must be excluded from power. Al-'aql, the ability to
reason and discriminate, is essential for all Muslims, and especially
for the one who is to lead; thus the exclusion of the masses is
necessary since they lack al-'aql. Only the elite, the ahl al-hal wa
al-'aqd, who can tie and untie, that is make decisions, are in a