On God And Government In The Middle East

From Spero News:

In societies where the attachment to Islamic beliefs is deep and organic, these Western policies all too often fall into the trap of treating "democracy" and "Islam" as mutually hostile value systems. This is simplistic and destructive. In fact, most Muslims want both democracy and Islam -- as the extraordinary intellectual and spiritual ferment that culminated in Iran's so-called Green Revolution so vividly demonstrates. "Sooner or later, we need to understand how deeply democratic ideas have penetrated the Middle East," Gerecht writes. "Intellectually the world has turned upside down." And he can cite sources from across the region that back up the point.

In this reading, the true standard-bearers of democracy in the Islamic world are none other than those "Arab fundamentalists who believe they can save their societies through God and democracy," and the best solution to the pathologies that still plague their world is to let their followers go to the polls.

He concedes that the results will not always be pretty. What we should keep in mind, however, is the moderating dynamic of popular participation. The author urges us to see elections as the start of a democratizing process rather than as its end. Citing the French Islam scholar Olivier Roy, he points out that the big Islamist movements are at their most moderate in those countries where they've been allowed a voice in the political process. (Roy's list comprises Turkey, Jordan, Morocco, and Kuwait.) And the Green Revolution, the product of three decades of Iranians voting (however imperfectly) for their leaders, dramatizes the extent to which the draw of the ballot box can undermine the radical fundamentalists.

So the new regimes may not give full rights to women? Perhaps. Yet Saddam Hussein's secular Iraq, for all of its anti-sexist rhetoric, was also a country that used rape as a technique of repression. Secular autocracies can scarcely be regarded as guardians of female sovereignty when it is the secret police who reign supreme. Surely the best antidote for male arrogance is allowing women to go to the polls -- a right that most of the mass Islamist parties actually embrace. True institutional change will come, says Gerecht, as women put their votes to use. (Cultural change, he suggests, is already under way, as more and more women in the region move into the workplace and traditional roles quietly shift apace.)

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