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Pakistan and the Arab-Muslim Culture of Denial
by Salim Mansur
January 28, 2014 at 5:00 am
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Since 9/11, Islamist culture is seen
to be synonymous with violence, misogyny and a pathological hatred for
others; and, ironically, it has made Muslims themselves its most numerous
victims. "Impure," or non-authentic Muslims, meant those whose
Islam had been weakened by un-Islamic or non-Islamic values imported from the
West, or contaminated by the Hindu culture of India.
Eventually political differences came
to be viewed, by the measure of Islam, in terms of the "purity" and
"impurity" of people. In the "Land of the Pure" [Urdu for
Pakistan], those suspected of impurity must be cleansed, purged or driven
out.
For Osama bin Laden there was a clear and unmistakable cultural divide
separating the Arab-Muslim world from the West. The idea that there is a
difference, perhaps even qualitative, in terms of culture between the West
and the East is considered a scandal by those who are convinced that our
highly interdependent world is headed in a direction where, at some point,
cultures will converge, or their significance be so diminished that cultural
differences will be merely a matter of curiosity.In our contemporary world, however, Bin Laden was right, as was Samuel Huntington, warning almost a decade before 9/11 that cultural differences matter in world politics[1]. When political leaders and intellectual pundits in the West minimize the role and influence of cultural differences in world politics, they seem to be insensible to historical record. The cultural trait most significant in explaining the difference between the West and the East is to be found in how people assess their place and role in history. There are those who willingly discern and identify, in history, their own responsibility for what affects them and others; and then there are those who on the contrary view history, even of their own making, fatalistically to avoid taking any responsibility for its outcome. These two opposing characteristics in general might be defined respectively as the Culture of Responsibility distinguishing the West, and the Culture of Denial, which distinguishes the East, in particular the Arab-Muslim world. The Culture of Responsibility is partly guilt-driven; guilt born out of anxiety, in both the individual and collective mind of people, that the choices they make can be wrong and, consequently, they cannot ethically shirk the role they have played in events in which they are actors. A sense of guilt is the spur that drives people individually and collectively to set right what is, or is seen to be, wrong; in an open, democratic society, this trait becomes an important self-corrective mechanism by which society reforms itself. The Culture of Denial is one of shame, honor and face-saving against the forces of history that push for change. In such circumstances taking responsibility for one's role in events is an admission of supporting change, for better or worse – and change, in this culture, goes against collective interests as reflected in the consensus behind age-old customs and traditions. In refusing to take responsibility, or being accountable, people in shame cultures are adept in blaming others while viewing themselves as victims of history. The contrast between these two cultures was evident in the manner in which the events of 9/11 were understood, explained, and interpreted by people in the West, in contrast to Muslims in the East. Once the shock and the grief lessened in time, analysts in the West sought explanations for 9/11 both in the thinking of those who carried out the terrorist attacks and also by looking inwardly toward what may have been the contributing factors, if any, of the West for provoking such attacks. Among Muslims, even those who denounced the perpetrators of 9/11, there was very little effort expended to understanding how their culture might have nurtured the thinking of Muslims that led to the terrorist attacks on the U.S. followed by similar attacks in Madrid, Spain, and London, England. Instead there was the reflexive response of blaming others, Jews or Israeli intelligence, and of brandishing the sociology of victimhood to exculpate the terrorists as victims long-suffering from the West's colonialist-imperialist policies and the alleged Israeli-Zionist occupation of Arab-Muslim lands in Palestine. Despite 9/11, many in the West have gone the extra distance to placate Muslim opinion in respect to the situation in the Middle East. There seems to be the sense of guilt, nestled inside the culture of responsibility, about the colonial-imperial history of the West in the region after World War I; that guilt raises its head when contending with, for instance, the history and politics of Arab-Muslim denial of any right of Jews to a secure homeland in Palestine. This feeling of guilt among western intellectuals has been effectively exploited by Arab and Muslim intellectuals, religious leaders, and politicians to explain away the failings of Muslim culture as the effects of the humiliations inflicted by the West. This misguided view has, unfortunately, resulted in the wrong-headed effort on the part of the West, led by Europe, the U.K., and the U.S., to appease the culture of Muslims that languishes in shame and denial. The world of Islam is much larger than the Middle East, and Muslim culture is not confined to the Arab world. The politics and history of Muslims from outside the Middle East, however, are less distorted by the lingering guilt of Western intellectuals, or by anti-Semites masking the oldest bigotry behind their excessive zeal in support for Palestinians in the Arab-Israeli conflict. This dismissal of culpability means that the Muslim culture is rendered more transparent in revealing what Kanan Makiya described as the "cruelty and silence" which surrounded the tyrannical rule of Saddam Hussein over Iraq[2]. The history of Pakistan, and the genocide in Bangladesh, also provides a disclosure of the failings of Muslim culture – a history largely ignored or forgotten by the West. As a result, the embrace of Pakistan by America has contributed to strengthening those benefitting from this culture of shame and denial. There is lesson here in understanding the culture of the Muslim world without any blinkers.
* * *
On 16 December 2013, Pakistan's National Assembly in Islamabad adopted a
resolution by a majority vote condemning the execution of Abdul Quader Molla
four days earlier in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The motion stated, "This House
expresses deep concern on hanging of a veteran politician of Jamaat-i-Islami
[JI] Bangladesh for supporting Pakistan in 1971." The motion was moved
by a member of the Pakistani JI in the Assembly; and, speaking on a point of
order, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, the Interior Minister, stated that Molla's
hanging was "a judicial murder for supporting a united Pakistan in
1971."
For Pakistanis, outrage over these trials in Bangladesh was itself an outrage; an inconceivable expression of denial as if, for instance, Germans had protested the trials of indicted German war criminals long after the Second World War had ended. What bothered the JI and others in Pakistan is, "How dare any Muslim, in this instance Bangladeshis, declare their soul-mates to be guilty and then hang one of them!" But the Pakistan's National Assembly in adopting a resolution condemning Bangladesh for hanging Molla – and on the forty-second anniversary of its army's surrender in Dhaka, Bangladesh, to the commanders of the Indian army and representatives of Bangladeshi "Mukti Bahini" [freedom fighters] – was a remarkable display of the collective denial of its own sordid history. In the intervening years, most Pakistanis had turned their backs on the events of 1971, and refused to learn any lesson from a political-military disaster that broke their country apart. Instead they readily suppressed the memory of the events, and constructed a narrative of victimhood portraying Pakistan betrayed and destroyed by Bengalis (or Bangladeshis) with the assistance of its archenemy, India. In Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) the JI is remembered as the party that openly collaborated with the Pakistani army in 1971. The JI had supported a united Pakistan, but against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the people in East Pakistan that it become a free and independent country. Ironically, former East Pakistan was the more populous half of Pakistan, yet it was pushed to secede by the oppressive dominance of the minority non-Bengali population overwhelmingly represented in the military, administrative and business elites of the country. By the time the Pakistani army started its campaign against the people of East Pakistan in March 1971, there remained very little in common between the two halves of the country, physically separated by India in the middle. The banner of Islam unfurled by the JI on the plea of unity was a travesty. Islam was the sectarian argument marshaled in 1947 by a segment of Indian Muslims to partition India. In 1971 the JI and its allies, to legitimate Muslim-on-Muslim violence, raised the banner of Islam to maintain the status quo, which meant East Pakistan would remain a satellite of West Pakistan. The events of 1971, with genocide in East Pakistan resulting in the breaking apart of Pakistan, demolished the country's founding narrative or rationale for the partitioning of India in August 1947 on the basis of Islam, to separate all Muslims, in a unified way, from India's Hindus. The wider significance of this history is what it reveals about the Islamist culture in general. Since 9/11, it is seen to be synonymous with violence, misogyny, and a pathological hatred for others, and, ironically, it has made Muslims themselves its most numerous victims. The argument advanced by Mohammed Ali Jinnah (1876-1948) and the Muslim League in the 1940s for dividing British India, was that Indian Muslims, as a result of their religion and culture, constituted a nation deserving a separate state of its own. This was the "two-nations" theory that insisted India, as a subcontinent, was comprised of two distinct, even hostile, "nations" – the majority Hindus and the minority Muslims. Jinnah's argument was a repudiation of the idea of "composite nationalism" – India as a land of diverse ethnicities, religions, and languages – favored by the Indian National Congress under Mahatma Gandhi's leadership. An independent post-colonial India that was visualized by Gandhi and others – including a wide segment of Muslims, led by formidable individuals such as Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (1888-1958), as the president of the Congress during this period, and the Pathan or Pushtun leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890-1988) with his legion of supporters known as Khudai-Khidmatgars ["Servants of God"] – was one of unity within diversity, and of a federation knit together by shared history governed democratically. Jinnah's argument, however, was turned into the battle cry – "We will fight to take Pakistan" ["lar ke leng e Pakistan"] – of the Muslim League, and it inflamed with bigotry the politics of partitioning India along a religious divide. The "two-nations" theory cemented the notion among Jinnah's supporters that Muslims as a minority in an undivided India could not live securely amidst a Hindu majority. The result was a horrendously painful tearing apart of British India in 1947, and a massive transfer of population that further embittered the relationship between the two peoples of India and Pakistan. Yet there remained behind, in post-1947 India, a substantial Muslim population, at present about the same size as that of Pakistan's – and a continuing reminder of why Jinnah's "two-nations" theory that Muslims of India constitute a "nation" and deserves a separate state of their own was absurd[3]. It was the events of 1971 that drove the stake through the heart of Jinnah's "two-nations" theory and the rationale behind the making of Pakistan – a name chosen for the independent Muslim state, meaning, in Urdu "the land [or home] of the pure." The subliminal message was that for Muslims to maintain the purity of their faith, it was necessary for them to separate themselves from those who were "impure": the infidels, or Hindus. It was a highly bigoted message, and a manifest lie given the complexity of shared history in India of Hindus, other non-Muslims (Buddhists, Jains, Parsis or Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians), and Muslims for over a millennium before the making of the British Raj. In that process a composite culture had emerged, in which the commonality of language, music, fine arts, poetry, cuisine, and dress had outweighed the differences in religions and religious customs. But Jinnah's message was to turn its back on the concrete reality of this shared history, to deny that such inter-mixing had taken place or that more of it needed to be nurtured, to refute the past reality and the future potential of Muslim and non-Muslim peaceful co-existence, and to select, instead, a Utopia of "the land of the pure." The choice for Indian Muslims upon which Jinnah insisted had relevance far beyond the confines of the subcontinent. Marshall Hodgson (1922-68), the author of the magisterial 3-volume study, The Venture of Islam, observed, "in the world as a whole the Muslims are, as in the more local case of India, distributed among a non-Muslim majority. The problem of the Muslims of India was in the end the problem of the Muslims in the world." In other words, in a world ever-shrinking through technological innovations, made increasingly inter-dependent in a globalized economy and drawn closer by the shared imperatives for peace, the test for Muslims is to show they can co-exist peacefully with the non-Muslim global majority. Jinnah's choice meant rejecting this test for Muslims, which was first and most urgently presented in India at the end of the Second World War. His choice was also a poisoned pill: once taken, there would be no avoiding its lethal consequences. These have come in spades. In "the land of the pure," those suspected of impurity needed to be cleansed, purged, or driven out. At first, non-Muslims, feeling insecure, gradually departed from the western half of Pakistan, although in the eastern half a substantial number of Hindus remained. Eventually political differences came to be viewed, by the measure of Islam, in terms of the "purity" and "impurity" of people. "Impure," or non-authentic Muslims, meant those whose Islam had been weakened by un-Islamic or non-Islamic values imported from the West, or contaminated by the Hindu culture of India, or who were measurably distant in terms of language, custom or ethnicity, from those more proximate to the physical center of Islam in the Middle East. In this sliding scale of "pure-impure," those Muslims farthest from the center, or too closely connected to a culture considered un-Islamic, were suspect in the eyes of other Muslims who considered themselves authentic or pure, as did the partisans of the JI. By the time political tensions reached the breaking point in 1971, Muslims in West Pakistan increasingly viewed Muslims in East Pakistan as less pure, or inauthentic. Bengali Muslims were seen to be in language and culture more proximate to the Hindus of eastern India than to Muslims in West Pakistan, who were viewed as more refined or "pure," as they were geographically closer to the Middle Eastern or the Arab center of Islam. The logic of Jinnah's "two nations" theory reached its terminal point when it was felt by Pakistan's ruling elite that, to keep secure "the land of the pure," military action against those whose Islam was less "pure" was imperative. It was this mentality of the military-bureaucratic elite, and widely shared by people in what is contemporary Pakistan that precipitated the genocide in what is now Bangladesh. The elimination of those who were regarded as "impure," as if they were infidels, became a religious obligation as much as a national security responsibility. In the end, Pakistan was broken apart, the military humiliated in defeat, the officers and soldiers taken to India as prisoners of war – and yet there was no soul-searching among those responsible as to why their politics failed so catastrophically. There was instead a deliberate suppression of the records, as well as a collective evasion of responsibility and an unwillingness publicly to examine and critically account for a history that had gone terribly wrong. There was no remorse, no apology made to those who were grievously wronged and, instead of guilt, there was an overwhelming sense of collective shame due to the military debacle that demanded, instead, erasure.
* * *
The Muslim culture of denial and shame, when stripped of the rhetoric of
Islamic piety, is the result of a tribal grounding. The Pakistani military,
setting forth to eliminate, by murder and rape, Bengali Muslim opposition in
1971 was not new in Muslim history. The savage war against the people of
Darfur waged by Omar al-Bashir's regime in Sudan; the genocidal slaughter of
Armenians by Turks in 1915; the Jews driven out forcefully from Arab states
after the establishment of Israel; the cruel destruction of the Kurdish
people by the Iraqis under the rule of Saddam Hussein; the sectarian
conflicts in post-Saddam Iraq; in Syria ruled by the Assad family; in
Lebanon; across North and West Africa; in the brutal occupation of East Timor
by Indonesia; in the destruction of the Christian communities across the
Middle East, and in the unending cycle of ethno-tribal violence in
Afghanistan; these are just few of the randomly identified conflicts that
have raged across the Muslim world in the period since World War I.The great Arab historian from North Africa, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), understood the tribal characteristics of his people and culture. As a scholar of Islam, he was not deceived by the formal pieties of rulers he served. One of these was Timur or Tamerlane, the conqueror from Samarkand who relished the massacres of his fallen enemies, and from such experiences Ibn Khaldun derived his immensely insightful and seminal notion of "asabiyyah" or group solidarity that holds tribes together while warring with each other. It is "asabiyyah" that yet defines Muslim politics based on tribal or sectarian loyalties, and it is "asabiyyah" that precedes the faith of Muslims in the teachings of Islam. Ibn Khaldun's insight provides the most penetrating understanding of Muslim history and politics. Islam's monotheism offered the tribes of Arabia the path to higher unity by renouncing tribalism, and through embracing a message of universal fraternity to set the example for others to follow. The Qur'an states, in a verse frequently cited by Muslims, that God has "created you all out of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, so that you might come to know one another." The Islamic teaching as illustrated in this verse is that everyone essentially belongs to one human family in which no one may claim racial, or tribal, or ethnic superiority over another. But this teaching – and the Prophet's repeated admonition, as reported by his companions, that man is "a God-conscious believer or a miserable sinner" and, moreover, "all people are children of Adam, and Adam was created out of dust" – was subverted at the outset of the period in Muslim history that came just after the Prophet. The great crime at the beginning of this history was the massacre of the Prophet's immediate family with the killings of his grandson Husayn and the male members of the retinue accompanying him at Kerbala, Iraq, as a result of inter-tribal rivalry. A consequence of this tragedy – even as it was suppressed in the collective memory of Sunni Muslims or those who came to represent the majority sect in Islam – was that the pattern of tribal conduct from pre-Islamic days became the norm of Muslim culture. In other words, instead of Islam raising Arab tribes to a higher culture of universal ethics, the reverse occurred – Islam was subverted into a tribalism, which, in our time, makes its reappearance in the ideology of Islamism. Islamism is tribalism in the sense Islamists insist, as ideologues of tribes do, on the basis of their version of Islam in excluding or eliminating not only non-Muslims as enemies but also Muslims – especially Muslims, who do not agree with their version of Islam. This is what the JI did in Pakistan; what the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots practice across the Middle East, and Khomeinists or the followers of Ayatollah Khomeini do in Iran: in turning Islam into a tribal religion, they have waged their "tribal/Islamist" warfare against their opponents – who are just about everybody. In the contemporary world, the Muslim culture of denial and shame, with its roots in tribal hubris and tribal solidarity, or "asabiyyah" in Ibn Khaldun's formulation, stands exposed and at odds with the modern values of individual freedom and the ethics of individual responsibility and accountability. This tribal culture, as Ibn Khaldun observed, regenerates through pillage and plunder; each tribe sees itself as threatened unless it dominates the other, viewed as rival tribes. Tribalism invariably sets in motion a cycle of tribal conflict that brings ruin to all; and then the cycle is re-set to be repeated. We are witnessing in the politics of the Muslim world what Ibn Khaldun recorded and explained in his own time. In an undivided India, Jinnah and his supporters drew upon the "asabiyyah" of Muslim culture to demand a separate state for Muslims. The politics of Muslim separation from Hindu majority in order to preserve the "purity" of Muslim religious-based tribal identity soon unfolded in demanding others within Pakistan to embrace this identity by renouncing their own, and with that requirement began the exodus of non-Muslims from the country, followed by the repression of those Muslims considered heretics, such as the Ahmediyya Muslims. There then followed the genocide in Bangladesh, and yet, in what remains of Pakistan, there is no sign of an end to tribal and sectarian conflicts. Further, the example of Pakistan is writ large across the contemporary Arab-Muslim world. The non-Muslim world cannot by fiat, or intervention, bring an end to the conflicts raging within the Muslim world. It is only Muslims who can end this, at least temporarily, through exhaustion, as it happened after the decade-long Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s; or by the decisive defeat of Muslim tribalism as it happened with Pakistan in 1971 in Bangladesh. Eventually, however, the basis of these conflicts will only end when the Muslim culture of denial and shame is replaced by the ethics of individual responsibility and accountability. The requisite for such replacement is stated explicitly in the Qur'an: "God does not change the condition of a people unless they change what is in their hearts." [Sura Ar-Ra'ad (Thunder), 13:11.] It could not be clearer or more simply stated.
Related Topics: Pakistan
| Salim
Mansur
Egypt: Are Elections "Democracy"?
by Andrew C.
McCarthy
January 28, 2014 at 4:00 am
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friends to like this.
From reading the American press, you
would believe that if Middle Eastern Muslims were allowed to govern
themselves by having free elections, this would be the route to democracy.
This is a fallacy that we have been following now as a matter of American
foreign policy for many administrations and many years. You cannot tell me
that, after the same Egyptians voted two-to-one to have an intense Sharia constitution,
eight months later they suddenly did not want Sharia any more. What they
decided was that they did not want Morsi any more.
If here is ever to be anything
approximating democratic transformation in Egypt the only way it is going it
happen is if Egypt has a respected institution, such as the military, that
governs the country, with the help of whatever technocratic officials it
needs to run the country day-to-day, and where the forces of secular
democracy at least have a chance to compete -- which means growing these
institutions to cultivate a respect for minority rights and individual
liberty.
The good news is that the Egyptians will not be able to keep their Sharia
constitution, at least not the way the Muslim Brotherhood designed it. But
the way it was covered in the United States, this was not reflected as good
news.What is going on in Egypt now, while I wouldn't go up in a balloon over it, is much more of a ray of hope than anything that we have had previously in what has been called the Arab Spring -- a misnomer, if ever there was one. We actually knew quite a bit about how Egyptians wanted to be governed before Mubarak fell thanks to polling that was done there – in fact, done not only in Egypt but across the Middle East, from Egypt all the way to Indonesia. There was pretty authoritative polling, for example, done by the University of Maryland in 2007 in conjunction with an outfit called World Public Opinion. It indicated that, depending on where you asked the questions, upwards of two‑thirds, and in some places over 80% of Muslim populations across the Middle East, wanted to live under Sharia, Islam's legal code and societal framework.
To call it just a legal code really does not do it justice, because its ambition is to govern everything from the great things to the small things, from the matters of economy, military relations, the setting up of a government or caliphate, down to interpersonal relations and even matters of hygiene. It is a soup to nuts framework for how life is to be lived – it is not only, in many countries, about girls being prohibited from attending school, but about the many other ways in which girls and women are suppressed, not only their education, but professionally and in interpersonal relations as well. From the Islamic perspective there is a belief that Islam has to be imposed, and that Sharia is the necessary precondition for Islamizing a society. The first World Trade Center bombing was really our first significant exposure in the United States to radical Islam conducting terrorists attacks on our shores in what turned out to be a systematic way over time. It is interesting to me that 20 years after the World Trade Center bombing we still do not have a good understanding in the United States of what Jihad is. If you listen to the apologists for Islamic supremacists who are featured frequently in the media, you would think that it is an internal struggle for personal betterment; that it doesn't have any military component. If you listen to them long enough, you would come away thinking that it wasn't anything more meaningful than remembering to brush after every meal. But Jihad is essentially a military concept, and people on our side, or on the national security side, of this debate have it wrong when they say it is everywhere and always a military concept. What it is -- everywhere and always -- is the advancement of Sharia. It is about the implementation of Sharia. Whether jihad is done violently or non‑violently, the point is to implant Sharia because Sharia is seen as the necessary building block for Islamizing a society. In the Middle East, it should tell us a lot that people across the region and in Egypt by upwards of two‑thirds said that they wanted to be governed under Sharia law. It should have given us a real clue about what was apt to happen once Mubarak fell and what, in fact, did happen once Mubarak fell. For all the hullabaloo about "democracy" and "democracy promotion," the first election in Egypt -- about two months after Mubarak was ousted -- got very little coverage. I think it was the most important of all of the elections they had – then and thereafter. The media did not cover it much in the United States and in the West; it was dismissed as a procedural election about scheduling and something to do vaguely with constitutional amendments. But in Egypt, it was teed up as an election between the forces of Islam and the enemies of Islam, which is how most electoral politics, since they have had electoral politics, is framed there. The point of that first election was, "Should we enact these few constitutional amendments, add‑ons to the old regime constitution, since that will enable us to have quick elections? Or should we write a brand new constitution and put the matter of elections off until we can do that?" The Muslim Brotherhood and the most influential forces in Egyptian society -- which are basically al‑Azhar University and the imams in the various mosques across the country -- strongly campaigned that the constitutional amendments should pass and that there should be quick elections. Why? Because they do not understand Egypt based on what they read in the Western press; they understand Egypt because they are there; they knew that if they had a quick election in Egypt, it would mean that the Islamic supremacists would win, and win overwhelmingly. On the other hand, the secular forces, the authentic democrats -- and there are some in Egypt, just not as many as we would like to believe – they preferred this idea of writing a whole new constitution. Putting off popular elections would give them a chance to grow democratic institutions. They hoped, over time, that they'd be able to compete with the Islamic supremacists. This was the way the choice to be made in the election was presented to voters. Then had this first popular election in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamists won by a whopping 78% to 22%. When people were free to vote for what they wanted, they voted for Sharia. They followed that up very quickly with parliamentary elections, and the Islamists won again by a margin of about 78% to 22%. In fact, the notable thing about the parliamentary election was that the secular democrats actually got fewer votes than the forces that are known as the Salafists, after the form of extremely conservative Islam from Saudi Arabia. The Salafists are Islamic supremacists groups that are actually even more impatient for change in a Sharia direction than the Muslim Brotherhood is. What we learn from the election is that, the position of wanting Sharia change even more rapidly than the Muslim Brotherhood was pushing for, was actually more popular in Egypt than secular democracy was. You would grasp none of this from the way the Arab Spring was covered in the American media. From reading the American press, you would believe that we were dealing with a country of 80 million "Jamal al‑Madisons" waiting to happen, and that if they were allowed to govern themselves by having free elections, that that was a route to democracy. This is a fallacy that we have been following as a matter of American policy now for many administrations and many years. This idea that popular popular voting is the equivalent of democracy; the notion that holding an election conveys the idea that a society wants to adopt a "democratic" culture, as we understand that term in the West. I went to Saint Hellena's Grammar School in the Bronx, and when we were in the third grade, we had popular elections. We elected a president, we elected a vice president, we elected a treasurer. It was great. It was a wonderful exercise in civic responsibility. But everyone knew the nuns were still in charge. We did not become a democratic culture by virtue of going through a popular election. It was instructional, but it did not change the basic facts on the ground – which is what we need to understand about Egypt. A popular election is an indication of where a culture wants to go, even if the direction is not democratic. A democratic culture respects minority rights and has at least a modicum of respect for liberty. It limits the role of government in life and ensures that government's role does include protecting the rights of minorities. We are about a million miles away from having in a place like Egypt. It was a foregone conclusion that if the Muslim Brotherhood stood for election to the presidency, a Muslim Brotherhood figure would win. By the time the transitional military rulers (who took over after Mubarak fell) woke up to what was happening in Egypt and saw the prospect of a parliament dominated by Islamic supremacists and a presidency dominated by Islamic supremacists, they realized that this would be a catastrophe. So they tried to derail it. They disqualified, on bogus grounds, the popular Muslim Brotherhood candidate, a man by the name of Khairat Al‑Shater, at the time, a much more important Muslim Brotherhood figure in Egypt than Mohammad Morsi. In fact, Morsi is a Shater protege. They disqualified Shater, perhaps thinking that this move would eliminate the chance of having the Muslim Brotherhood control both the parliament and the presidency. Once they won the parliamentary election in a landslide, they then went back on their commitment to not field a presidential candidate, which they were allowed to do but which was very unpopular in the street. I think the generals probably thought they had more leverage at the time because of the Muslim Brotherhood's broken promise, than they might otherwise have. And they probably believed that, by eliminating Shater from contention, they had fixed the problem, because nobody really knew who Morsi was. Shater is regarded as a hero, even among people who are outside the Muslim Brotherhood, because he was persecuted by Mubarak. Morsi was much less charismatic and much less well‑known among Egyptians than Shater. Three weeks before the election, when they had a debate of the major candidates, Morsi was not even invited to participate. Yet, he ended up winning. He won the first round by a fairly comfortable margin, and he won the second round in what passes for a squeaker in Egypt: about 52% to 48%. Egypt was being run by the generals – the so-called Supreme Counsel of the Armed Forces. They had a lot of authority to do pretty much whatever they wanted in terms of setting the conditions for candidates to seek office. Obviously, they underestimated the ability of the Muslim Brotherhood to turn out the vote. The other political advantage the Brothers had was this: the organization is notoriously sneaky and dishonest. Initially, they said they would not field a candidate for president. Just as they initially said they were only going to seek 30% of the seats in Parliament – and then, when they realized they could win more, they upped it up to 50% … and then 80% … and then they sought everything. It's worth noting that a Sharia upheaval under the guise of the "Arab Spring" was highly predictable in Egypt. After all, Egypt is an overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim country, with about a 10% Christian minority, and very few Shiites. It is easier to peg than other countries in the region that have more of an ethic and religious mix. For example, even in Indonesia, which is thought to be about as moderate an Islamic country as a Muslim majority country can be, the 2007 polling indicated that 50% percent of people wanted to be governed under Sharia. Even there, it depended on where you asked the question: If you asked it in Aceh Province, which is very heavily Islamic supremacist, it was closer to 80%. The most notable thing about the Egyptian presidential election may have been that the candidate who got 48 percent – i.e., the candidate who lost to Morsi in the final round – was not a secular democrat. He was a relic of the Mubarak regime. You see, the Egyptian people realized that if they were going to stop the Muslim Brotherhood, turning to the secular democrats was not a route to do that. There weren't nearly enough of them. The only way to rein in the Islamic supremacists was to turn to the old regime. The electoral experience in Egypt shows us how very far away that nation is from democratic culture. That carries over beyond Morsi's ouster. I would caution people who were so very impressed by the rioting and the rallies that went on, and by the millions of people who poured out onto the streets, not to mistake the uprisings in Egypt as opposition to Islamic supremacism. That misimpression is embedded in the narrative that the Western press has tried to develop – a narrative that actually has convinced a lot of people here – that Morsi imposed a Sharia constitution on Egypt, and as a result, there was great rebellion and uprising in the street. It's simply not true. Morsi did not impose the Sharia constitution on Egypt. Yes, Morsi did everything that he could to protect the process of enacting and adopting a Sharia constitution. That is because there was some concern, on the part of not only the Brotherhood but also the Salafist parties, that the Egyptian courts would interfere and try to derail the process of a new Sharia constitution. Morsi took authoritative action to protect that process. But in the end, the Sharia constitution – a constitution that was more intensely Sharia‑based than the previous constitution that Egypt had – was not imposed on the Egyptian people. They were invited to vote on it. And when they did, the Sharia constitution won by a margin of two-to-one. It didn't just win. It won huge. You cannot tell me that the same Egyptians who voted two-to-one to have an intense Sharia constitution suddenly decided, only eight months later, that they did not want Sharia anymore. What they decided was that they did not want Morsi anymore. What we need to understand here is that it is not a good idea to conflate how people in Egypt feel about the Muslim Brotherhood, with how they feel about Islamic supremacism. The fact is that they have a lot of reasons to dislike the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood, for very good reason, is reputed to be dishonest, power-grabbing, and treacherous. It is disliked even by other Islamic supremacists. The Brotherhood has a considerable following. It is the most important grassroots Islamic-supremacist organization across the Middle East. But it also has many detractors. Many other Islamic supremacist groups, including Salafist groups, would like to see it toppled just so that they could replace it as the most influential Islamist organization – in a majority Islamic country, that is power. So we should not mistake the ouster of Morsi with the rejection of Islamic supremacism. In fact, the main Salafist party in Egypt was actually in on the ouster of Morsi – standing by the military and vigorously supporting it. Why? Because they would like to be the new Brotherhood in terms of power and influence. Much more than a commentary on -- much less a rejection of -- Islamic supremacism, what happened in Egypt was more of a function of the country's being an economic basket case on the verge of being a failed state, where much of the population is living in squalid conditions. The Saudis, who used to have fairly cordial relations with the Brotherhood -- which is why we have a number of these Islamist organizations that we have in the United States -- have now turned on the Brotherhood, in fear that the Brothers will foment the same kind of rebellion in Saudi Arabia as they have in Egypt, and as they are trying to do elsewhere. Once Morsi was ousted, the next thing you heard was that there was an influx of $12 billion from the Saudis and some of the other Gulf States. The ouster of Morsi actually resulted in capital that is desperately needed by a country that really is on the brink of financial and economic disaster. Why has what has recently happened been somewhat of a hopeful sign? If we really want to promote democracy and we really want to see countries like Egypt turn to democracy, we have to be realistic about the culture we are dealing with. We have to be realistic about what an uphill battle democratization is. We are talking not about something that can be done in an election or three. This is the work of a generation or more. And even in a generation or more, it is no sure thing that Islamic cultures are going to democratize in the Western sense. If there is going to be anything approximating democratic transformation in Egypt, it can only happen if a respected institution, such as the military, governs the country with the help of whatever technocratic officials are needed to carry on governance day-to-day. Only that can create a climate in which the forces of secular democracy have at least a chance to compete -- which means a chance to grow in influence, a chance to promote a culture of respect for minority rights and individual liberty. With the possible exception of al-Azhar University, which has been the seat of Sunni learning – the heart of Sharia – since the tenth century, the Egyptian military remains the most widely respected institution in the country -- largely because military service is compulsory for all able-bodied males. The fostering of true democratic culture is not something that, in a place like Egypt, is going to happen overnight. If we really want to promote democracy, it would be better to tie American aid to actual improvements in individual liberty. For example, to be more concrete about it, why do we abide the fact that Mecca and Medina are closed cities? Do people know that? In Saudi Arabia, non‑Muslims cannot set foot in Mecca and Medina. They're deemed unfit to set their feet on the ground. And then there's the mutawaeen, the religious police, who vigorously crack down on things like women driving, women out on the street without accompaniment, women working in certain industries, etc. I think that we ought to be tying our aid to rescissions of those repressive elements of Sharia. Such a linkage would not only be much more consistent than popular elections with the idea of promoting a democratic culture; it would be politically popular among the segments of the population that you need to activate, particularly women, if there is ever actually going to be cultural change in the Middle East. It may take decades for it to happen, but it will not happen if we force or strong-arm anyone, as it seems our government now wants to do, into having popular elections under circumstances where everything we know tells us that popular elections will result once again in Islamic supremacists coming to power. It will result in a rerun of the same episode that we have lived through for the last six months. Do we finally realize this? It is not certain our government does, but people are in the United States may be waking up. The dominant dynamic Islam of the Middle East is Islamic supremacism. This dynamic does not mean that there are not reformist Muslim currents. It does not mean that that there are not other interpretations of Islam. But it is important to face facts – the reality – of with what we are dealing. The dynamic Islam of the Middle East is stridently anti‑American. It is stridently anti‑Western, and it is very repressive. I do not think that that is going to change soon. That is not to say that it cannot change ever, and that there is not a lot of tumult in the Muslim Middle East about reform. But we are a long way from anything approaching democracy. We must finally understand that elections do not equal democracy, and that if we want to promote democracy – which we should do – we need to do it at a very grassroots level. We need to be as supportive as we can of the secular democratic groups that are promoting minority rights, and get away from this idea that it is constitution-writing and elections that foster democratic culture.
Related Topics: Egypt
| Andrew C.
McCarthy
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