The Wall Street Journal,
Nov 25, 2003.
Reviving Mideastern Democracy
We Arabs need the West's help to usher in a new
Liberal Age.
BY SAAD EDDIN IBRAHIM
Wednesday, November 26, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST
(Editor's note: On June 30, 2000, Egyptian authorities charged
Mr. Ibrahim and several colleagues with crimes allegedly connected
to his administration of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development
Studies; officials closed the center the next day. After a long
legal fight and 15 months in prison, Mr. Ibrahim was cleared of
all charges by the Court of Cassation, Egypt's highest civilian
judicial body, on March 18, 2003. The Ibn Khaldun Center reopened
on June 30, three years to the day after the arrests.)
The
world has changed forever in those three years that I was under
attack in Egypt. Few can now doubt that democracy, peace and
development are interlinked and must be sought together,
especially in my part of the world. This is what we at the Ibn
Khaldun Center had been saying for 15 years before the state
prosecutor forced a hiatus on our activities three years ago. We
have come in for our share of criticism, some of it defamatory,
but we have never wavered from this message. I personally will
promote and defend it as long as my health permits, because it is
true and it badly needs to be heard as widely as possible.
I
am now in my 60s, and am hoping that after me and my
contemporaries will come a second and then a third generation of
nonviolent freedom fighters--not only in Egypt, but throughout the
larger Arab and Muslim worlds as well--who will speak this truth.
Already some of these young people are on the scene, saying things
that could not be said 10 or even five years ago.
Our
region is passing through troubled times, whose signs and symptoms
are well known and have received ample publicity, especially since
9/11. There is a strong feeling of malaise and humiliation. Some
of that stems from the aftermath of the war in Iraq, but there are
longer-term causes as well. Among them are the stifling of debate
and discussion and the way citizens find themselves cut off from
fairly and fully presented information about the world. This is
connected in turn to the lack of honest print and electronic media
that will let Arabs and Muslims hear the truth about the problems
that beset their countries, and about those who rule these
countries.
Official restrictions on political discourse have burdened the
Middle East for a long time. Part of the Ibn Khaldun Center's
problem was its determination to speak out and to provide
platforms for diverse points of view. The channels open to us were
limited in number and scope, but we did our best to make the most
of them. Despite the limits within which we worked, and despite
the always peaceful character of everything we published, some of
the powers that be decided that they could not tolerate us.
So
they arrested me and closed the center, and civil society in
Egypt--hardly robust to begin with--took a severe beating. The Ibn
Khaldun Center staff were muzzled and intimidated for a while, but
thanks to the persistence of some very courageous people on staff
and elsewhere in Egypt, plus supporters outside the country, a
world-wide campaign to defend the center and its work began to
take shape. And eventually, with their help and that of
organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the
center emerged triumphant.
The
Court of Cassation's March 18 opinion was not merely a victory for
one wrongly accused man or institution; this was a victory for an
agenda--the cause of democracy and the rule of law--that the world
now realizes is the only real alternative to Saddam Hussein, Osama
bin Laden and their ilk.
Democracy is the way forward. It is the only sure way to keep the
Middle East from going to the brink of war every few years. In an
article recently published in the Washington Post, I counted the
number of times that the United States or other Western powers
have had to form military coalitions or use large-scale armed
force in the region to avert or resolve a problem. From 1958, when
President Eisenhower sent U.S. Marines to Lebanon, up through the
Iraq war of 2003, the rate of military interventions has averaged
one every seven years. God knows when the next one will be, but
without democracy they are sure to continue, and that is no light
matter. It is time for us as Arabs to put our own houses in order.
There are a thousand and one difficulties facing us as we work to
institute democracy in the Arab world and the larger Middle East.
And yet what choice do we have except to try once, twice or as
often as we must? Government by consent, respect for human rights,
and support for the rule of law are the only things that can
finally and securely protect our countries, our region and the
world against the threats of terrorism and of crises that compel
outsiders to come and use military force on our shores.
How
do I rate the prospects for democracy in the Middle East? I think
that they are surprisingly good. I am well aware of those who
marshal evidence to show that instituting democracies and open
societies in the region, or perhaps even in the larger Muslim
world, is difficult or impossible. The difficulties are well known
and undeniable. But they can all be overcome. In previous decades,
authoritative voices said that Germany, Japan, Slavic countries
and even Catholic societies would never, could never, be
democratic. I am not speaking of popular prejudices here, but of
high-level scholarship and expert consensus. Batteries of learned
naysayers honestly believed that there was something about German,
Japanese or Slavic culture, or about Catholicism, that was
fundamentally and unchangeably hostile to democracy and democratic
values.
Experience, of course, proved that these doubts were not as well
founded as they seemed. At the Ibn Khaldun Center, we are
convinced that similar doubts about the potential for democracy in
Arab cultures, the Middle East, and the Muslim world will
ultimately prove just as feebly grounded. Indeed, I am heartened
by the instances of modest progress toward greater political
openness that we are already seeing. The successes are limited,
but real. The most prominent has come in Turkey, which recently
witnessed an alternation in power following a free and vigorously
contested election--with a party of self-avowed "Muslim democrats"
now running the government. Less dramatic examples of increasing
political competition can be found in Morocco, Bahrain, Jordan and
Kuwait. Movement forward has so far been tenuous and uneven, but
these countries--and also Yemen--do appear to be making some
headway, at least.
From this I take a renewed measure of hope and determination, as
do the many people throughout the region who think like me. And
make no mistake, there are quite a few of them. They are not all
famous or high-profile, but there are plenty of people who are
interested in democracy and its possibilities. Those of us who
have made a public and systematic commitment to open politics and
free societies have an obligation to reach out to these people. We
need to engage them and make them partners in the cause of liberty
and self-government.
In
this project, civil society is crucial. That is the title that we
have given to the Ibn Khaldun Center's major periodical
publication. We define civil society as a free space within which
people can assemble, work together, express themselves, organize
and pursue shared interests in an open and peaceful manner. This
is the sort of thing that the center was founded to encourage. The
space available for the work may vary--at times it may shrink to
the dimensions of a tiny prison cell, as it did in my case for a
while. But even while I was locked in that cell, I felt freer than
my oppressors, and that is what gave me strength for all of those
three years.
Near the end of my time in prison, I heard about Prof. Hashem
Aghajari in Iran, a fellow intellectual who was arrested, tried
and condemned to death for blasphemy because he dared to criticize
the rule of the mullahs over his country and to tell his fellow
Iranians that they should not be blind followers. I had never
heard of him or read any of his writings--he is a historian who
publishes in Persian--but I felt an instant bond with him and
sensed that we had something deeply in common. Prisons are seldom
comfortable places, but I understand that he had a particularly
hard time of it: He is an amputee, having lost one of his legs
fighting in Iran's war with Iraq in the 1980s, and in jail his
stump became infected.
In
the Middle Ages there used to be something called the Silk Road,
which was an overland trade route that ran from the Atlantic
shores of Morocco to the Great Wall of China. It was a famous
path, steeped in lore and plied by picturesque caravans. When I
heard of Prof. Aghajari and then of dissidents in Tunisia also
languishing in jail, another picture popped into my head: The
romantic Silk Road of yesteryear has in our time become a kind of
Despots' Alley or Tyrants' Row, with various sorts of unfree
governments lying end-to-end on the map from Beijing right on
through to North Africa.
But
then I reflected some more and thought, in all these storied lands
there are people who are working for the same things that I am
working for. Whatever might happen--whether prison or even death
might await us--we could all feel that we were part of a larger
freedom struggle whose value and significance humbled us even
while they lifted us up.
I've never believed anything more strongly in my life. This is not
just about Egypt, or the Middle East, or the Arab peoples--this is
a global struggle, a battle for the world. Those who are carrying
it on in countries and regions such as mine need the help of
citizens in mature democracies. Reach out to us, engage us in
dialogue, give us a hand if and when you can, and let our message
be heard in the West so our culture and our religion will not be
unjustly condemned as intrinsically against freedom and democracy,
because they are not.
People everywhere
aspire to freedom and democracy. They might not always articulate
their hopes in a lucid manner that would find a fair hearing here
in the West, but they are there, believe me. They need
opportunities to organize and to do the work that needs to be
done. In Egypt, despite all our ups and downs, we have had a civil
society sector for more than a century and a half. In 1840, Greek
émigrés who had settled in Egypt founded the first group that you
might call a modern nongovernmental organization; by 1900, there
were more than two hundred such local groups. Great hospitals,
relief organizations, and our first secular university all began
as the works of civil society organizations. Likewise, Egypt could
boast a vibrant multiparty parliamentary democracy, an independent
judiciary and one of the earliest movements for female
emancipation anywhere in the world.
For about a
century, then, from around 1850 until about the time of the Free
Officers' coup that toppled the monarchy and brought Col. Gamal
Abdel Nasser to power in 1952, there flourished in Egypt a Liberal
Age that is all too often unjustly forgotten in discussions of
Arab politics today. Leading thinkers and writers such as Taha
Hussein and the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Naghib Mahfouz
characterize that period, but there were literally hundreds of
others. This was also a time of relative sectarian peace and
tolerance. The great Oxford historian Albert Hourani's "History of
the Arab Peoples" is a good primer on this and other aspects of
political development in that period.
The Liberal Age
came to an end after the Arab defeat at the hands of Israel in the
1948 war and the subsequent rise of military regimes across the
Arab world. With ideological roots in populist nationalism, these
governments soon became entrenched autocracies. Civil society
groups, political parties, trade unions and the independent
judiciary were among their early victims.
When we founded
the Ibn Khaldun Center and as we guided its work throughout the
late 1980s and 1990s, we had the Liberal Age very much in mind. We
saw ourselves not as builders from scratch, but as revivers of a
great (but not perfect) tradition that had existed not only in our
country but also in Syria, Iraq, Iran, Morocco and elsewhere. We
were and we remain determined that this liberal tradition--and the
Egyptian Court of Cassation, as witnessed in our legal case, is
part of this legacy--will not be forgotten. We believe that if
these ideas receive the exposure they deserve, the memory of this
tradition and, more importantly, the still-living relevance of its
core teachings on rights, freedom, transparency, and justice, can
play a large role in showing that democracy does indeed have a
reasonable chance of putting down roots and growing in the Middle
East.
Instead of the
"paralysis by analysis" that comes from cataloguing all the
familiar reasons why our peoples will "never" be ready for
democracy, we choose to remind ourselves of the liberal options
that were once open and can be open again. This relies on careful
research as well as skillful public outreach, and yet it is
obviously not mainly a historical exercise. Our attempted
retrieval of the achievements and aspirations of the Liberal Age
is something done for the sake of the future. It gives us, and all
the freedom-loving people who want to join us, something to build
on and something to fight for--in spite of censorship, police
repression, and extremism. Our determination is high, and I for
one think that our chances are good. I hope that you will help us.
Mr. Ibrahim is chairman of the board of the Cairo-based
Ibn Khaldun Center for Development
Studies October issue this essay appears. This essay,
based on remarks he delivered at the National Endowment for
Democracy in Washington on May 15, appears in the October issue of
the endowment's Journal of Democracy.
Details of Mr. Ibrahim's case may be found in both English and
Arabic at
www.democracy-egypt.org.
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