PANKAJ MISHRA: ISLAMIC ELECTORAL RISE IS DUE TO FAILED SECULARISM….HUH?
SUCH WISHFUL THINKING AND NOT A WORD ABOUT THE KORAN OR SHARIA OR JIHAD OR THE BARBARIC TREATMENT OF WOMEN…..IT’S JUST SECULARISM GONE SOUR……RSK
“As Ebrahim Yazdi, one of the leaders of Iran’s Green Movement, put it in an open letter to Ghannouchi last week, there is reason to be “seriously concerned about the long range outcome.” He continued: “Our people, Muslims of every nation, struggle for the restoration of their basic rights, liberty, and sovereignty. But we do not have sufficient experience with democracy … We fight and overthrow dictators, but not dictatorship itself.”
Furthermore, the ideological oppositions that arouse many laptop warriors in the West — liberal democracy versus Islamism, secularism versus theocracy — bleach out the mundane but more significant social and economic factors behind the Arab Spring: For instance, the fact that welfare-statism in Tunisia followed by a globalized and apparently successful economy produced a latent middle class whose high expectations, fueled by the entertainment media, turned out to be impossible to fulfill.
A socioeconomic analysis would reveal how a mass of aspirers first came to be denied the highest fruits of capitalist modernity, and were then pressed down to the ranks of permanent losers. A historical account of secular Arab despotisms would also show why and how they destroyed the semblance of civil society previously maintained by clergy and other Islam-minded social and political organizations.
It may be comforting for some Westerners to think of middle-class Tunisians and Moroccans holding — like their counterparts in Greece, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S. — study sessions on Galbraith, Keynes and Marx in tented “People’s Universities.” But it seems more natural that Arabs should turn to belief systems and political organizations still standing in the ruins of the ancien regimes, whose promise of social justice has become more attractive than ever.
These may seem menacingly “Islamist” in Western eyes. But it is more useful to think of present and future election results in Muslim countries as expressing a strong desire for accountable governments that guarantee civil rights and a degree of egalitarianism. That such desires are outlined by an old ideal held by a moral community of believers should not be so surprising.
Even in Iran, which has suffered greatly from hard-line Islamists, reform movements uphold Islamic principles. Following the efforts of the country’s former president Mohammad Khatami, the Green Movement has struggled to attain liberal freedoms within an overall Islamic polity. While thwarted by a brutal and increasingly reckless regime in Tehran, this endeavor will now be undertaken in Arab countries, where devout Muslims deftly using a vocabulary of social and political rights are all set to assume state power.
It is possible, of course, that their experiment of reconciling Islamic principles with modern statecraft and globalized economies will fail. It may even result in religious tyrannies and the exodus of secular and liberal elites.
As Ebrahim Yazdi, one of the leaders of Iran’s Green Movement, put it in an open letter to Ghannouchi last week, there is reason to be “seriously concerned about the long range outcome.” He continued: “Our people, Muslims of every nation, struggle for the restoration of their basic rights, liberty, and sovereignty. But we do not have sufficient experience with democracy … We fight and overthrow dictators, but not dictatorship itself.”
Yazdi prescribed some ways of avoiding “the mistakes we have made in Iran, or those of our brothers in Algeria and elsewhere.” These included a “recognition and celebration of the diversity of human society and pluralism” and the spirit of tolerance and compromise.
These are admirable ideals. We will see whether and how the new Islam-minded rulers of the Arab world will enshrine them in legal and political institutions — as opposed to declaring that the Shariah law contains all that you need.
It is not even clear whether they realize that, as Yazdi puts it, “elections are valued instruments, but are not by themselves democracy.” In any case, unlike with Ataturk long ago, this time the whole world is watching to see whether the promise of political natality in the Muslim world can be realized.
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