THE POWER OF NONVIOLENCE

Mubarak Awad and Dr. Abdul Aziz Said
Reprinted, with permission, from Common Ground Newsservice.

Most often, successful nonviolent action is a catalyst for building moral and political support to change social and political policy. Gandhi's march to attempt, peacefully, to occupy the salt works in India was powerfully effective because so many had the courage to just keep marching in file up to the entrance where the guards beat them down with clubs. The U.S. Civil Rights movement also made powerful gains through individuals working together to take similar risks. In Birmingham, Alabama where peaceful marchers, kneeling and singing hymns, were attacked by police wielding clubs and unleashing police dogs, the moral point of the marchers was forcefully made to the millions who saw the event on television and perceived the justice of the marchers and the injustice of the authorities.

Strategic nonviolent action is often provocative.It places the opposition, often the authorities, in a double bind. If the nonviolent act is allowed, it makes its point and the movement gains strength. If the authorities resist, particularly where they resort to violent means, the relative justice of the actors and injustice of their opponents is magnified, bringing considerable political gain to the activists.

Nonviolence requires courage. But courage is not foolhardiness and action that is intentionally or recklessly destructive of one's self and/or supporters is harmful and thus inherently violent and unjust. Courage, the will to act, must be balanced by moderation. To be just, one must be reasonable and act reasonably. Being reasonable involves a number of qualities including taking the time to understand and evaluate a situation carefully before acting, so that action will take into account all of the elements of the situation and be appropriate to them.

The weapons of nonviolence include psychological, economic, and political methods and can be divided into five categories. Methods of nonviolent protest and persuasion include formal statements, communications with a wider audience, symbolic public acts, vigils, drama and music, processions, public assemblies, and withdrawal and renunciation. Methods of social noncooperation include noncooperation with social events, customs, and institutions, and withdrawal from the social system. Methods of economic noncooperation include boycotts by consumers, by workers and producers, by owners and management, by holders of financial resources, and by governments. Methods of political noncooperation involve rejection of authority and citizens' noncooperation with the government. Methods of nonviolent intervention include direct actions with psychological, physical, social, economic, and political components. Weapons of choice consist of hunger strikes, nonviolent occupations and blockades, and the establishment of self-reliant institutions or rival parallel governments.

Similar to other instruments of power, such as conventional war or guerrilla war, nonviolence has its own requirements for effectiveness that need to be adhered to in order to produce the maximum impact of techniques. The success of nonviolence depends on a number of factors. There has to be a grand strategy with realizable objectives. There must be an incremental motion from one realizable objective to the next. The grand strategy must be adaptable to change without loosing track of values. Intensive training, self-reliance, and self-discipline are necessary for the individual and the group. There is no room for improvisation.

Nonviolent strategy has a long history with varying degrees of success. Success sometimes has come through changing the minds and attitudes of the opponents, but that is rare. More often partial success has been achieved through accommodation (gaining and giving up part of one's objectives). Nonviolent strategy has also demonstrated its capacity to produce nonviolent coercion of the opponent (so that no alternative remains but to capitulate). At times, the opponents' regime is even disintegrated in face of massive repudiation and paralyzing non-cooperation as was the case in the downfall of the Marcos regime in the Philippines in the Eighties. Nonviolent strategy has been waged in recent years, in many parts of the world including Chile, South Africa, Poland, Hungary, Burma, and Palestine itself during the early period of the first Intifada. Nonviolence was also used to end the Milosevic regime in Serbia. Historically, nonviolent strategy has wielded significant power in conflicts when applied skillfully and has often been met with serious repression by the opponents. That response reveals the power of nonviolence. In fact, the brutalities of repression against nonviolent resisters trigger a process of "political jiu-jitsu" which increases the resistance, sows problems in the opponents' own camp, and mobilizes third parties in favor of the nonviolent resisters.

Nonviolence is compatible with Islam. Nonviolence in Islam is connected to the concept of power. Islam's metaphysic views power as the prerogative of the Creator, and basic to Islamic anthropology is the conviction that creatures function to serve the divine purpose of creation. Action for liberation is a form of obedience to the Creator, according to Islam, since it is stated in the Hadith that "No obedience to a creature while disobeying the Creator." From that perspective, it becomes an important aspect of Islam to fight injustice. Jihad can be waged by heart, tongue, and hand. In the Hadith it is said, "a true Muslim is one whose tongue and hands bear no violence and a perfect Mujahid is he who has given up those that are prohibited by God." Jihad is an effort; a striving for justice and truth that need not be violent.

The vast majority of Arab liberation movements against European colonialism in the Arab world utilized nonviolence. In Morocco, for instance, the "Latif" prayer was used as a tool by the nationalist movement against the French during the 1950s, and was banned by the French. The "Latif" prayer invoked divine qualities of kindness and mercy. This is but one of many possible examples.

Dr. Mubarak Awad is the Director of Non-Violence International, Washington, D.C. Dr. Abdul Aziz Said is the Director, Center for Global Peace, American University, Washington, D.C.
Source: Al-Hayat, July 15, 2001, Distributed by Common Ground News Service.