Overthrow of Tunisian dictator, a momentous development

by Izeth Hussain

(February 06, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Arab Democracy - The people’s power that overthrew the Tunisian dictator has had expected repercussions in Egypt and other parts of the Arab world, which is quite rightly seen as a momentous development. Even if there is no domino effect, and no further Arab dictators are overthrown, the very fact that mass scale demonstrations against dictatorship took place in Tunisia and Egypt is in itself momentous. It raises the question whether the attraction of democracy is universal.

Democracy

Some decades ago it was supposed that democracy was essentially a Western Protestant phenomenon, its persistence elsewhere as in India and Sri Lanka being regarded as an oddity. But Catholic Ireland was firmly democratic, and in the course of the ‘seventies Catholic Spain and Portugal took to democracy, and so did the Catholic countries of Latin America. The notion that Catholic culture favoured authoritarianism and dictatorship against democracy was shown up as nonsensical. Likewise, the notion of incompatibility between Greek Orthodox culture and democracy was shown up as 10-2nonsensical when after the break up of the Soviet Union all of Eastern Europe including Russia took readily to democracy. At the same time democracy started spreading in Afro-Asia as well.

The record shows therefore that there is no incompatibility between four of the great world religions and democracy. Predominantly Hindu India and predominantly Buddhist Sri Lanka have been democratic for decades, and as I have shown above all varieties of Christianity are perfectly compatible with democracy. It is only the world of Islam that is supposed to be peculiarly recalcitrant to democracy. It does seem significant that when the Soviet Union broke up all the East European countries readily took to democracy, but after a brief spell the former Islamic Republics of the Soviet Union quickly took to dictatorship. However, democracy has been spreading in the Islamic world too as shown by the cases of Turkey, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Pakistan has been alternating between democracy and military dictatorship, as did Turkey at one time. Iran is very difficult to classify as it is not a fully functioning democracy - just like many third world countries that pass off as democracies - but it is not a dictatorship, and perhaps it should be classified as pluralist. The record shows therefore that it is only the Arab countries, with the exception of Lebanon, that have been strongly recalcitrant to democracy.

Two questions arise: why is it that the Islamic countries have been the most recalcitrant to democracy, and why is it that the Arab countries have been peculiarly so? The first question is regarded as a complex and difficult one, which cannot be properly addressed in this note. I will therefore merely set out my own position, which I believe is an unassailable one. There is no incompatibility, none whatever, if we go back to pristine Islam. On the basis of the practices of pristine Islam, I would hold that a properly Islamic government has to be democratic. Some time ago I wrote an article in which I cited material from Tabari, one of the early historians of Islam, on the death of the Prophet. On his death-bed he, who had always acknowledged that he was fallible like all other mortals, asked his followers whether they had any complaints against him. One of them said that he had suffered acute pain when the Prophet had accidentally struck him with his whip while they were horse-riding. The Prophet offered to be whipped by that man. It did not happen because that man was merely testing him out. Can anyone imagine a contemporary dictator acting likewise?

The political practices of the hallowed Rashidun Caliphate - that is of the first four Caliphs when according to Muslim tradition Islam was practiced in all its pristine purity - were unimpeachably democratic. When the second Caliph, Omar, who was far-famed for his intrepidity, asked his fellow Muslims after Jumma prayers whether they had any complaints against him, they replied “O Omar, if we have any complaints against you, we will let you know by this”, brandishing their glittering swords under the noon-day sun. If we are to go by the political practices of pristine Islam, most of the Muslim potentates who held sway since then, including of course the present-day Arab dictators, can only be regarded as un-Islamic rogues and thugs.

I come now to the second question: Why is it that the Arab countries have been peculiarly recalcitrant to democracy? It arises firstly from their geographical location, their close proximity to Europe unlike the rest of the Islamic world, as well as their historic interaction with Europe, which was basically antagonistic. The Spanish thinker Ortega y Gasset showed brilliant prescience when in the ‘thirties he wrote of the Arab countries as - if I remember rightly - “the great Islamic magma” of Europe, molten lava that could erupt volcanically. We tend to forget that the Arab world has the same importance for Western Europe as has Latin America for the US, or Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia have for Russia. The principle is that neighbours have a special importance in international relations, which the world has tended to forget in connection with the W.Europe/Arab world relationship because of the Mediterranean, which historically was no more than a lake, not a barrier to intimate interaction. The important point is that neighbours have to be made friendly, or be made neutral and innocuous, or be dominated.

Of course it is not just the fact of being neighbours that makes the Arab world important for Western Europe. Its immense oil resources and what that spells for the global economy makes it have a special importance for the whole world. The other factor giving special importance to the Arab world is Israel. It has become evident that Israel does not want a two-state political solution, or in fact any political solution at all. It wants the Palestinians to get out of the lands that once belonged to them, or accept second-class citizenship in a racist apartheid Israel. We must consider what that could mean for the West. The US has always shown a fanatical devotion to Israel, and the Western European countries too have a special relationship with Israel. It is they who are spearheading the moves for a New World Order which as I have argued in earlier articles has on the obverse side the New Imperialism. They may not be really averse to the New World Order having a partly racist character. Hitler is not entirely dead.

But why resort to dictatorship rather than democracy as a strategy to keep the Arab world in check? The basic reason is that the Arab peoples cannot reconcile themselves to a totally intransigent racist Israel, and consequently they have deep reservations about Western Europe and utter loathing for the US. Solid Western support for the Arab dictators becomes understandable. True, some of those dictators are anti-Western, but for the most part they are jokers whose mischief can be kept within bounds because they too lack the people’s support.


Dictators

The chosen watchdog for Western interests in the Arab world has been the US, an excellent choice because it had vast expertise in installing and keeping comfortable corrupt and brutal dictators in Latin America. It had to be expected that during the Cold War the Western preference for the third world component of the “free world” was dictatorship, with India and Sri Lanka being given no credit whatever for practicing democracy. I have seen with mine own eyes the Yankos gang-raping democracy in Pakistan in 1958, and in the Philippines in 1972, both of which countries have suffered enormously as a consequence. After 1965 the US installed a whole series of pro-Western dictatorships in Ghana, Indonesia, and several black African countries. The Western enthusiasm for democracy in the third world is a new-fangled affair, and we can safely suppose that there is something deeply ambivalent about it. It has to be expected that they will do everything possible to see that the successors to the Arab dictators are amenable to the West. But that will be to no avail in the long run. The Arab peoples are standing up.