Arab Democracy versus the New Imperialism

by Izeth Hussain

(February 27, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) I don’t think that the uniqueness of the pro-democracy turmoil going on in the Arab countries has been properly recognized. The East European countries took to democracy smoothly and without a people’s struggle because the centralized control by the Soviet Union had collapsed and the SU itself took to democracy. There were manifestations of people’s power leading to democracy in the Philippines and South Korea, but there were no killings of demonstrators there. In Egypt on the other hand, it took over 300 deaths to compel Mubarak to step down from power, and the killings can well be resumed if the army is stupid enough to want to consolidate its present power. In Libya, Ghaddafi has butchered over 100 up to now, while in Bahrain too there have been killings, though on a lesser scale. There has been a rugged determination, accompanied by preparedness for self-sacrifice on the part of the Arab masses to reach out for democracy that has not been witnessed elsewhere.

Another peculiar feature of the demonstrations is that none of them has had a leader, such as Khomeini in Iran, or a prominent party or coalition of parties to play the leadership role. In Egypt, a co-coordinating role, not a leadership one, has been played by young members of the middle class, together with the Moslem Brotherhood which has nothing like a dominant position. The situation has been compared to that of May 1968 student uprising in Paris which assumed the character of a mass revolution, though it too had no leader. At a certain stage, the German student Cohn-Bendit became the most prominent figure in the uprising, and the German philosopher Hubert Marcuse became its intellectual icon. But no person or party exercised a leadership role. In later decades, May 1968 came to be seen as enormously significant but there has not been as far as I know any cogent explanation of what it signifies. A difference is that May 1968 was entirely non-violent while in the Arab pro-democracy uprisings violence has been deployed on a massive scale. The crucial point is that nevertheless the Arab masses have stood up with magnificent courage. These uprisings seem therefore even more significant than May 1968.

New Imperialism

What really do they signify? I believe that their significance has to be seen mainly in relation to the New Imperialism and the struggle against it, an enormously complex subject that has to be dealt with in further notes. Here I will do no more than try to establish that such is the main significance of the uprisings. I have argued earlier that cultural explanations for the appeal of democracy are not convincing because all cultures, irrespective of whether their belief-systems are sympathetic or antipathetic to democracy, have equally taken to democracy, suggesting that the explanation has to be found by postulating an underlying human nature. However, the case of Islamic societies seems to be peculiar: the belief-system of Islam clearly places a far greater emphasis on equality than that of any other religion, and as Islam emphatically requires a direct unmediated relationship between the human and the Divine, Islam can be taken as being very sympathetic to individualism. But in the modern world, Islamic societies have been the most recalcitrant to democracy.

Before proceeding further I must clarify that cultural factors do of course impact on the political realm. An example is that of the Ottoman Empire which placed an exceptional emphasis on the principle of equality before the law. It was the proud boast of the Ottoman rulers - who tended to be looked down upon by the Arabs as latecomers to Islam - that they practiced the Divine Law of the Sharia in all its rigor, placing the rulers on an equal footing with the ruled. Another example is the social egalitarianism prevailing in many Muslim countries despite the immense inequalities in income and power. I am told that Wilfrid Thesiger recounts in his book Arabian Sands his encounter with a Bedouin who had gone to Makkah to meet the King. He asked the Bedouin how he had addressed the King, a question which had perplexed the Bedouin who wondered how else you can address a man except by his name. He had called ibn Saud - the King, by his name “Abdul Azeez” and spoken to him man to man. I recount Malcolm X, the Black Muslim leader, stating in his memoirs that he was surprised by the ease with which he could talk with King Feisal as man to man, something unimaginable with a Western monarch.

So, while the proud egalitarianism of Islam did have a socio-economic impact, and the belief-system of Islam is totally compatible with democracy, the West evolved in a liberal and democratic direction, while the world of Islam did not. In that world, a rigid political orthodoxy was developed, in which the central tenet was that any kind of order, however despotic and provided that it did not go against Islam, was preferable to chaos. It is a line of orthodox political thought that has remained very powerful in the Islamic world to this day. I will not attempt here to deal with the complex factors that have been behind that orthodoxy. However, in the contemporary world, particularly after the Second World War, it is far easier to explain the Islamic recalcitrance to democracy. I have argued in earlier notes that the West led by the US has been very supportive of brutal and corrupt Arab dictators as a way of keeping the Arab peoples in check, the underlying purpose being to secure a hold on Middle East oil resources and to ensure the success of Yanko-Zionist racism as a part of the New Imperialism.

Pristine purity

We must see the pro-democracy upheaval in the Arab world in the perspective that I have sketched out. In a way, it goes back to the pristine purity of Islam under which governance was thoroughly democratic, in total consonance with the Islamic belief-system. But of course what we are witnessing is not retrogression but a forward-looking revolutionary movement that has behind it the inescapable need to cope with modernity. In the contemporary world Islam tends to be seen only or mainly in terms of terrorism and backward-looking fundamentalist movements. Such movements can have their validity only if they return to the sources for self-renewal in going forward. Otherwise they are doomed as they cannot cope with the stresses of modernity.

In trying to assess the significance of the uprisings we must take count of two developments. One is that of the reform movement for a liberal modernizing version of Islam that was initiated by Jamaldin al-Afghani in the late 19th Century. Its best-known luminary was Iqbal, and its credo was most amply stated in Ameer Ali’s The Spirit of Islam. It was a dynamic movement for several decades, but it seemed to have become moribund around 1930. It has seemed to me for some time that it gave the impression of having become moribund precisely because it had succeeded in establishing itself as mainstream Islam. It is that version of Islam, liberal and the best fitted to cope with the stresses of modernity, which is behind the pro-democracy upheaval.

The other development is that of Western imperialism, more specifically the Arab sense of humiliation at the hands of the West. The Arabs engaged in the Arab Revolt with the help of Britain against their fellow-Muslims, the Turks, at the end of which instead of getting their promised independence they found themselves divided and reduced to the position of colonies and semi-colonies. The Arab struggle against Western imperialism began in earnest after the Second World War, resulting in decolonization and the successful assertion of true independence as distinct from merely formal sovereignty, which was the major programme of the Non-Aligned Movement in which Arab leaders like Nasser played prominent roles. In my view, NAM reached its apogee with the Colombo Summit of 1976 when it seemed that the anti-imperialist programme had been successfully accomplished. But it turns out that that success was only against the Old Imperialism.

Since then the New Imperialism has been established. I want to conclude this note by pointing to the connection between the Arab pro-democracy upheaval and the New Imperialism. The New Imperialism is part of the drive to establish a New World Order. This New World Order is a multipolar one in which the dominant positions are held by the West, Russia, China, Japan, and India, with Brazil expected to join the club after some time. It is to be noted that this list includes three out of the four great seminal civilizations of the world, namely the Western, the Indic, and the Sinic, but not the fourth, the Arab. The Arab countries can also become a regional power-centre only if they take to democracy because - as the historical evidence shows very clearly - imperialism can be countered effectively only through democracy. The question of the antithetical relation between the New Imperialism and democracy has to be dealt with in further notes. To my mind, no question is more important than this for small and vulnerable countries such as Sri Lanka.