The first reality that we all
need to come to grips with is that an Islamic society is Islamic. It is not naturally Islamist just as Germany
was not naturally Nazi.
After all that we need to recall
our well earned faith in democratic process however much the pundits gnash and
wail. I will admit that I too
occasionally suffer lapses. Yet history
happens to be a stunning affirmation of the true power of democracy itself in persistently ordering society.
The difficulty has been that it
takes generational time for a population to master the art and to educate itself. Today many societies are well on the way and
we are often accepting new countries into the process itself. The most recent is Burma .
All such transitions are of
course tentative and nervous and often nasty as the society works out
historical contradictions. Recall today
just how quiet the Balkans have become.
Whatever our natural doubts about
the Middle East the process will be between Islamic
peoples and serious historical contradictions are on the chopping block. That may include a cleansing of radical Islamists. Regardless these types of factions will be
neutered by democratic process.
The real difficulty that will
take time to address is internal social freedom as determined only recently in
the past two centuries. This includes freedom
of religion and speech and equality of women.
Understandingly, these are on the back burner while they figure out how
to change leadership and legislate without killing half the population.
The fact is that all are voting
and the pressure is surely on and we can expect an accelerated transition
although it is still generational.
At the present, Syria is shooting
its way into democracy. When exhausted
or even defeated on the battlefield, the present dictatorship will succumb and another
demos will arise.
Once settled, I suspect another
state will erupt and the same process will repeat itself simply because no one
has actually successfully beaten off the population. The lesson is well learned and Iranians now
know that it is a matter of toughing it out.
They have already had a couple of false starts and today the elite have
no support. The outright collapse of
Iranian Mullah Rule will spell the end of Islamism itself. In the meantime the
loss of Syria
is a huge blow as it removes its primary tool and conduit.
Gwynne Dyer: Libyan election shows democracy in the Arab world is still
making progress
By Gwynne Dyer, July
11, 2012
The good news about last weekend’s election in Libya , as
relayed by the Western media, was that the “Islamists” were defeated and the
Good Guys won. The real good news was that democracy in the Arab world is still
making progress, regardless of whether the voters choose to support secular
parties or Islamic ones.
The Libyan election was remarkably peaceful, given the number of
heavily armed militias left over from the war to overthrow the Gadhafi
dictatorship that still infest the country. Turnout was about 60 percent, and
Mahmoud Jibril, who headed the National Transitional Council during last year’s
struggle against Gadhafi, won a landslide victory.
Jibril, whose National Forces Alliance was a broad coalition of diverse
political, tribal, and ethnic groups, denied that it was a “secular” party— a
necessary posture in a deeply religious and conservative society like Libya ’s—
but it certainly was not an Islamic party. Yet it won 78 percent of the vote in
Tripoli , the
capital, and 58 percent even in the oil-rich east.
The explicitly Islamic parties, the Justice and Development Party
(Muslim Brotherhood) and Al-Watan, did far worse than they expected, getting
barely 20 percent of the vote in Benghazi ,
the big city in the east. But they should not have been surprised.
In Tunisia to Libya ’s west and Egypt to the east, the Muslim
Brotherhood was the mainstay of resistance to the dictatorships for decades,
and it paid a terrible price for its bravery. It was natural for voters in
those countries to reward Islamic parties when the tyrants were finally
overthrown. Gadhafi was more ruthless and efficient in crushing all opposition
in Libya, and the Muslim Brotherhood had scarcely any local presence.
So Libya gets a “secular” government, while Tunisia and Egypt get
“Islamic” governments— but the point is that they all get democratically
elected governments, and stand a reasonable chance of becoming countries that
respect human rights and the rule of law. Tunisia, indeed, has already made
that transition, and Egypt, with one-third of the entire population of the Arab
world, is still heading in that direction too.
The relevant question is not whether a party is Islamic; it’s whether
it is democratic. The distinguishing feature of the Islamic parties that have
emerged in post-revolutionary Arab countries is that they have almost all
chosen barely modified versions of the name of Turkey’s ruling Islamic party,
the Justice and Development (AK) Party.
The AK party has governed Turkey with remarkable success for
the past 10 years. The economy has flourished, the army has finally been forced
to stop intervening in politics, and you can still buy a beer almost anywhere
in Istanbul .
AK is a socially conservative party, of course, like Germany ’s Christian Democratic Party or the
Republican Party (aka the White Christian Party) in the United States . But like those
parties, it respects the constitution, civil rights, and the voters’ choice.
It’s hardly surprising that its leader and Turkey ’s
prime minister, Recep Tayyib Erdogan, was greeted as a hero when he visited Cairo shortly after the
revolution.
There is no good reason to believe that Islamic parties in Arab
countries will behave worse than “secular” parties, any more than we would
worry if a “secular” party in Germany were about to lose to a “Christian”
party. In fact, the Christian Democratic Party currently leads the coalition
government in Germany ,
and civil rights are still safe.
The Western prejudice against Islamic parties (and local prejudice
as well) comes from a confusion between Islamic and “Islamist” groups, the
latter being the English word for fanatical groups that reject democracy and
advocate violent jihad against infidels and “heretical” Muslims. This
confusion, sad to say, is often deliberately encouraged by Western and local
interests that really know better, but want to discredit those who oppose them.
It didn’t work in Egypt ,
where the Muslim Brotherhood’s party won both the parliamentary and the
presidential elections. This did not please the Supreme Council of the Armed
Forces and its allies from the old regime, and they arranged for the Egyptian
Supreme Court (whose members were all appointed by the old regime) to dismiss
the new parliament on a flimsy constitutional pretext just two days before the
presidential election last month.
Then, as the voters were actually casting their ballots, the army also
stripped the office of the president of its right to control the armed forces,
gave itself the right to impose new laws, and declared that it would choose the
group who write the new constitution. It was a coup implicitly justified by the
rise of the “Islamic menace”— and some secular Egyptian politicians, disgracefully,
have gone along with it.
Egypt’s newly elected president, Mohammad Morsi, has refused to accept
the army’s decrees, and a delicate game is underway in Cairo in which he is
trying to discredit the soldiers and gradually drive them back into their barracks
without risking an open confrontation that could trigger an actual military
coup. He will probably win in the end, because the army knows that the masses
would promptly be back in Tahrir
Square if it did try a coup.
And if Egyptians don’t like what their Islamic government does, they
can always vote it out again at the next election.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are
published in 45 countries.
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