Muslims, Trust and Multiculturalism by Amina Yaqin Peter Morey & Asmaa Soliman

Author:Amina Yaqin, Peter Morey & Asmaa Soliman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

The Achievement of Transparency

Built in 1815 as Copenhagen’s town-hall (later relocated), the classical façade of the current ‘Domhuset’ (City Court) dominates one of the squares off Strøget, the long pedestrian street winding through the heart of the city. High above its Roman pillars, there is inscribed the legend: ‘Med lov skal man land bygge.’ This is the first phrase in a foundational law book, codified in 1241. It means, literally, with law the country shall be built. Ordinary Danes often tend to trace the legalistic and even the democratic basis of their country to this phrase in particular. What this phrase signifies today is not just authority but trust. To see the ‘law’ in the phrase above as signifying only authority is to see one side of the story. The other side is the fact that the law has to be trusted: there has to be belief in the capacity of the law to build a country, and that in itself requires trust. What is being highlighted is not imposition but construction, not prohibition but voluntary acceptance, not discipline but democratic achievement: the country has to be built with the help of laws that its citizens consider transparent and fair, and hence trust.

However, this is a contemporary reading. Though it has become customary in some circles to confuse versions of tribal or class communality with political democracy, the fact remains that in the thirteenth century the definitions of belonging—let alone citizenship—were very different from what pertains today. They were significantly different in the early nineteenth century too, as women, among others (the working classes, etc.) ought to be able to recall. Whether one defines citizenship in the liberal tradition as a negotiation of equality between strangers or in the conservative sense of a given community of belonging, it can be shown that women gained admission to citizenship quite late, and it can be argued that their gender still impacts on their rights as citizens.

Sovereignty, too, as embedded within the ‘state’ and the ‘nation,’ had another meaning in the past. As Habermas notes, ‘[t]he democratic transformation of the “ Adelsnation,” the nation of the nobility, into a “ Volksnation,” a nation of the people, required a deep change in consciousness of the general population’ (Habermas 1996: 127). He adds that ‘[t]he ruling estates, which met in “parliaments” or “diets,” represented the country or “the nation” vis-à-vis the [aristocratic] court. As the “nation,” the aristocracy gained a political existence that the mass of the population […] did not yet enjoy’ (1996: 127). In short, the ‘law’ of the pre-democratic state, run by a nobility usually in tandem with a theocracy, was not a democratic matter of secular negotiation: it was ordered by both ‘God’ and a certain class of ‘man.’

To adapt the Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, one can say that the phrase ‘Med lov skal man land bygge’—as codified in a law-code of the thirteenth century or even as inscribed on a public building in the early nineteenth century—was definitive of a disciplinary society.

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