Since some years ago, the word “democracy” was geographically linked in the minds of many with the words “Western Europe” and “North America”, while the rest of the world lived under the mercy of authoritarian or totalitarian regimes. But by the end of the eighth decade of the previous century, the autumn of totalitarian regimes, the governments of which started falling one after the other, arrived, in what has become known as the “white revolution”, or what Samuel Huntington called the “third wave of democracy.”
Despite all this, the Middle East region remained distant and in isolation from this wave, to the extent that some were compelled to cynically say that “the democratization of the Middle East had joined the phoenix, the Ghoul, and the loyal friend to form together the four Impossibilities!”
And that “if the job would take decades for the Middle East to catch up with modernization and modernity, it might take millions of light years for it to catch up with democratization, and that it should start counting from the fifth century BC, the date of the emergence of the first democratic state in Athens.”
Even many intellectuals have long echoed phrases like “Middle Eastern peoples are not ready yet to deserve democracy,” since democracy in the Western world had been fought for by the people and it took years and cost lives.
And since it is taken and not given, the people of Georgia demanded it during the Rose Revolution and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and so forth.
Yet some of them take it as far as saying that what has happened and is happening in Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine in terms of the arrival of “extremist” parties, movements and forces to power through elections and the ballot boxes proved what the British playwright satirist George Bernard Shaw said, that ” -democracy as to the way to do it is like letting the passengers drive the train: it can only end in collision and wreck. ” It applies nowhere in the universe more than it does in the Middle East!
Each of these views remains, in my view, a form of fallacy and error, although there are reasons to justify them, ranging from the fact that the simple Middle Eastern citizen has surprisingly mastered the art of remaining on the sidelines! Now the “Chamacherjiyah ” group governs him and constricts his breath! Also, in general, the Middle Eastern citizen never attempted to remove the halo of sacredness and worship from his leaders, or detach all linguistic ornamentation and false promises from their speeches, which are not acceptable even to a bird’s mind, and the tricks of hiding behind paper barriers, only to eventually find himself face-to-face with speeches bearing all the specification of a terrorist text. He also never stopped believing those leaders, as they marketed the loss as a profit, so they presented their Qadissiya and their Mother of All Battles as historic victories, and continued in this vein fooling the peoples, confiscating their smiles and subsisting on their pain!
But, no matter how numerous and multiple justifications and excuses were, this region remains with more need for democracy than other regions. In fact, democracy is the best and only solution, and the healing balm for all the problems of the Middle East, and this is a matter that “no two goats would lock horns about”!
It is widely agreed upon that democracy is the best system of government developed by humanity, given the values and principles of freedom, equality and peaceful rotation of power it calls for. I do not think that the occasion calls for a review of the pros and reasons for pride in democracy since that would take hundreds of pages.
Why the democratization of the Middle East?
The answer in very simple terms:
Because most of the countries of the Middle East and Asia have concentrated systems of government, and are mere simple countries in light of international law, and hence they lack the most basic rules of democratic governance. They abuse authority and violate the rights of minorities, which undermines the legitimacy of their existence, and violates the rights of women and make them half human beings, delays the development of the region, as well as causes brain drain, destroys the human being, and disseminates subversive ideas, chaos and the cancellation of the other.
As to their ingraining of laws that restrict freedoms and provisional laws and the domination of emergency regulations, they have resulted in an appalling absence of the simple citizen from the circle of action and participation.
All of this made the state - which does not have any balance of good deeds with the miserable citizen - turn in its imagination to a control, imprisonment, and oppression apparatus, i.e., a tool for direct and immediate physical control, and no longer enjoyed any value or political, moral, or social dimension or content.
Thus, most Middle East regimes have failed - from my point of view - to achieve social justice, due to the absence of democracy, and this has led to a state of disintegration and dispersion, especially on crucial issues. The decision-making mechanism and the nature of these regimes generally tend towards individualism and moodiness without study or close scrutiny of issues that cannot stand personal judgment.
Therefore, the gap between the Middle Eastern ruler (who does not believe that there is really anybody on this earth who deserves life) and the citizen is so wide that it cannot be bridged.
All of this dictates that the Middle East be the focal point of continuous and chronic tension, forces its peoples to stay in the captivity of Mafioso regimes, and pushes its countries towards isolation, marginalization and fragmentation. It also makes democracy a distant unattainable dream.
To prevent this, such countries need to expand the space available for organization of an independent civil society, including independent media, citizen support groups and organizations concerned with the defense of women.
They also need to improve their basic practices of governance, which entails standing up to corruption and nepotism and promoting the separation of powers, the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary, but it also means activating the role of the police and prisons to be more humane and legal, and to be at the service of the people and not at the service of the pocket.
It is true that inequality cannot be eliminated, yet it can be mitigated , and the Middle Eastern woman can run for elections and can gather votes that qualify her to win in honest democratic parliamentary and presidential elections where ballot boxes would have the Supreme word and the upper hand.
The impediments to spreading democracy in the Middle East:
But the path to democracy in the Middle East is not furnished with flowers, for as the Iraqi proverb says, “nobody would sell watermelons in the market for free,” since the process is riddled with practical difficulties that can be summed up - in my view - in five major impediments:
The weakness of political opposition in the Arab countries compared with those in Central European and Latin American countries during the phase of political transformation that those regions had experienced during the 1980s. Despite the important developments witnessed by the opposition in many countries, they, however, do not have strong popular parties, but traditional elite parties.
It is hard to imagine how the region’s societies would find the space for forming advanced and stable democratic reform without significant and rapid economic modernization. If one considers the state of affairs now, one would find that the economic situation of many Middle Eastern regimes does not give much cause for optimism. The per capita income rate has been receding or declining, and 45% of the population of the Arab world is now under the age of 14. The population as a whole will double in the next quarter century, and unemployment now affects over 20% of the labor force. Thus, these conditions do not represent a healthy environment for constructive political change.
The dominance of two major political forces of the Middle Eastern political space; the first is represented by the ruling political regimes, which range between traditional and modernist autocratic regimes, where such regimes are supported by static parties that do not face any real political opposition. As to the second group, it is made up of “extremist” groups that use religion and provide various services for the mobilization of the poor, the marginalized and rural areas, and presents to them the idea that freedom and democracy are Western commodities. While the ruling regimes justify their control of power and disruption of any real political reforms as a form of societal defense against the control of extremists, the extremists, on the other hand, take advantage of their exclusion from political life at the hands of the State as a means to attract sympathy.
The strong connection between geo-political and security issues in the region on the one hand, and the process of democratization on the other hand, is a connection characteristic of the Middle East to a greater extent than seen in other regions. Whenever religious, sectarian and nationalist goals and fancies flare up under the influence of regional conflicts, the process of dissemination of democracy in the region becomes more difficult and complex, and the isolation and marginalization of reformists, democrats and moderates increase, while extremists and hard-liners become stronger, and the pressures exerted on the ruling regimes for real internal reforms recede.
The tendency of Middle Eastern peoples - for numerous reasons - to hold foreign countries and others responsible for the region’s problems, in addition to the responsibility for solving these problems, is a pattern of thinking that does not conform to the process of democratization in the region. External parties might be responsible in one way or another for these problems, and they might be responsible for providing assistance to face those problems, yet true democratic transformation comes only when the interior and the Middle Eastern peoples themselves assume the responsibility of self-determination, for democracy must come from within, or it will not come at all.
But could democracy be exported to the Middle East?
The answer is very simply no.
I do believe and am convinced that it is not possible, since it is impossible to transfer or relocate democracy from a society which enjoys all aspects of development and which has well-established norms of democracy and peaceful rotation of power to a society which has lived in the shadow of cruel despotism since centuries ago and in light of a primitive semi-industrial-agricultural society that is deprived of everything.
And so, to my knowledge, the social and political experiments cannot be cloned nor can they be exported, yet one could benefit from them. The failure of the Iraq experience after the fall of Saddam is the best example of this.
Therefore, democratic change must start from within the societies of the region. It could not be achieved through foreign recipes, but there are certainly many things other democratic nations could carry out in support of domestic reform.
More than any other region, external factors control the marking of the boundaries of the internal politics arena, its factors and historic opportunities and prospects.
This is what suspends the fate of the region, its states, peoples and policies on international disputes, as has been pointed out previously, limits the ability of peoples to achieve self-determination, and also provides opportunities to manipulate international conflicts by ruling powers to escape their obligations to their peoples, to provide the means for the protection of their presence and to stand in the face of any opposition standing in the way of their continuation.
Like democracy cannot be feasible without a free popular will, there is no free popular will without national sovereignty.
The Middle East is in dire need for the prevalence of a culture that accepts the other in a region where the smaller frustrated and disgruntled nationalities constitute raging volcanoes that are always prepared to conflict with each other.
Perhaps some of the conditions for the success of democracy in a society are the existence of a spirit of tolerance, acceptance and peaceful coexistence with those one differs with, i.e., the acknowledgment of the right to differ, and therefore, democracy is an implement, an education, and an acceptance of the other, who does not believe in violence and believes in dialogue. There is no tolerance of or dialogue with those who believe in political or religious violence (terrorism).
When religion is mentioned, a controversial question comes to mind. It is as follows:
Does Islamic democracy exist?
One does not need to think for long to be convinced that democracy and religion are not contradictory terms, or an oxymoron. Whoever presented the idea of either democracy or Islam made a mistake. Those who claimed that the Islamic world needed theocratic and non-democratic regimes was also mistaken, and saying that the less democratic a society is, the more religious it becomes, and that democracy is an abomination of the devil!
Perhaps the political science professor at the American University at Beirut Dr. Ahmad Al-Musali - whose book I had the opportunity to read - was right when he said that Islam was a democratic religion as evidenced by the Holy Qur’an including many verses that serve this concept, like Ash-Shura (consultation), “and instructed them to consult amongst themselves…,”and the unanimity principle, both of which presuppose on principle and in detail the participation of society in conducting the affairs of the State.
Where does authoritarianism come from, then? Where does the problem originate? It comes from worn out and backward mentalities that believe in a culture of perpetually remaining on the seats of power! What happened in the Islamic world since the Ummayad era was only a misreading and misapplication of the Qur’an!
In fact, if one were to reflect on the positions of Islam on freedom and equality, their polar opposites (tyranny and inequality), and the management of public and common affairs, one can only acknowledge the harmony and accordance between Islam and the position of democracy on the same values.
And if we assume that a certain religion is from God and that it is aimed at necessarily reforming human beings, it is no longer acceptable or logically or mentally sound to say that this religion has no say in reforming the human sociality! Such a claim is not free of misunderstanding and a clear perception of the deficiency of God’s predestination, and especially if we take into account what has become known thanks to the evolution of human knowledge, that it is so stupid and stolid to separate between reform of the human being and reform of human sociality or to think that reform can be completed without reform of the human sociality. Since reform of the political aspect of human sociality is an integral part of the reform of human sociality, saying that Islam has no connection with organizing political affairs or governance - and hence democracy - is incompatible with the acknowledgment that Islam is a divine religion.
A Chamacherji is the person who opens a path for a neighborhood leader and the Agha and announces their arrival.
A name Saddam Hussein used for his war against Iran from 1980 to 1988
A name Saddam Hussein used for the second Gulf War of 1991
A statement by John Rowles.
Written by: Abdessamad BEN JOUDA
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