"[I] also hope for [Tunisia's] Ennahda turns out to be a reasonable, moderate party that would be a good model for rest of the region," Elliott Abrams of Council of Foreign Relations tells RT TV network (previously known as Russia Today) the other day. Unfortunately, however, his is a statement that clearly reflects the West's skepticism over type or types of governments emerging from the ashes of dismantled despotic regimes in the Arab world, although democracy is not a sharply defined form of government.
The West seems to have premised its concerns-legitimate or otherwise-on some developments in Tunisia where an Islamist party, Ennahda, won the parliamentary elections last month and in Egypt where the Muslim Brotherhood is slated to emerge as the strongest party in the elections later this month. Moreover, the Transitional National Council has already announced that the Sharia will be the `basic source' of legislation in post-Qadhafi Libya. Now the question is: Aren't these developments stimulating uneasiness, breeding considerable anxiety and tending to arouse both animosity and curiosity in the Western world, which is finding it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to accept the existence of "Islamic democracy" and allow it to work side by side with its own myriad models of "Jeffersonian democracy".
David Rosenberg, the columnist for Jerusalem Post, is one such skeptic who seems to be in disagreement with assertions or generally accepted conclusions in relation to the Arab Spring. Answering a question at RT's Crosstalk, he argues that the West has "legitimate" concerns as far as Tunisia and the rest of the Arab Spring countries are concerned. In the past, he emphasises, the experiment with democracy and Islam has not been very successful. "We see what happened with Iran [in 1979]...what happened with Hamas in the Gaza Strip [2004] and with Hezbollah in Lebanon [2009]. Having said that, it really does seem that you are really witnessing something of a revolution in the Arab world." In fact, he further argues, Tunisian voters went to the poll where they had a choice of electing a party reflecting Islamic values and that party is prepared to go into coalition with liberal and secular parties, "which is very very encouraging".
However, he seeks to lay emphasis on the fact that there had been coalition between religious and secular parties in the Arab world. In this regard, he refers to a coalition that exists in Lebanon now and the other between Hamas and Fatah in the Palestinian areas in the past. According to him, the question is not just elections-fair and free elections-but the question is whether or not political players have decided to move forward and prepared to play the democratic game. "That's the test we have to wait for."
Benny Morris, professor of history at Ben Gurion University, who has so far shown consistency in expressing his "doubts" over the direction of the Arab Spring with a measure of dishonesty, has also articulated his argument in his article titled "Arab Spring or Islamist Surge?" along the same lines. Writing in The National Interest, he has averred: "[S]peculation about whether the party is genuinely `moderate' Islamist-as its leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, insists-or fundamentally intent on imposing sharia religious law over Tunisia through a process of creeping Islamisation a la the Gaza Strip and Turkey is immaterial."
Morris points that the Islamists have registered an emphatic victory "against all initial expectations-and in a country that was thought to be the most secular and "Western" in the Arab world. Freedom of thought and religious freedom are not exactly foundations of Islamist thinking, and whether Tunisian "democracy" will survive this election is anyone's guess."
So why is the West which has employed a bumbling foreign policy in the Arab world in recent months skeptical about the change in the Arab world? Here Nader Hashemi of University of Denver seeks to provide an answer to this question through a highly informative perspective. According to him, when it comes to the invocation of adjective "moderate" with respect to Tunisia or Egypt what we are really talking about is `moderation' to the extent that "the regime supporting working within the framework of US geo-strategic interests in the region is considered to be moderate-Arab regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Hosni Mubarak's Egypt, King Abdullah's Jordan. Yes, they are moderate in the sense that they are working very closely with US foreign policy, but they're certainly not moderate with respect to any objective definition of what constitutes democracy and with any definition of what constitutes, you know, universal standards of human right."
Reinforcing the point of Ennahda party's Yusra Ghannouchi who had underscored at the same talk show the need for moving away from reductions and simplifications in relation to questions whether or not Islam is compatible with democracy and whether or not there will be a ban on bikini and alcohol in this former French colony while insisting that Tunisia is a Muslim Arab state and that her party does not want to impose theocracy, Professor Hashemi says what really matters is not how some people in the West are characterising events in the Arab Spring. According to him, what needs to be celebrated is that it is for the first time in the modern history of Arab and Islamic world the people of the region are having revolutions. And perhaps the first opportunity for the people of this region is to exercise meaningful self-determination.
Yusra seeks to address the West's concerns by saying that "Islam and democracy can be compatible just as you can have religious-inspired democracy you can have religious dictatorship, and you can have secular democracies and you can have secular dictatorships. In the past in the Arab world, more or less, we have had throughout the Arab world secular dictatorships. So there's no definite relationship between secularism and democracy; so let's make that clear. So the problem is now, you know, Islam is coming into politics."
According to her, the first challenge for the Tunisians is to establish democratic systems with a view to forestalling the possibility of return of dictatorship-religious or secular. The second challenge, she adds, is the economic crisis which has only worsened after the revolution. That the Tunisian society encompasses diverse ideologies or it embraces the concept of unity in diversity to ensure co-operation among diverse groups of people espousing different ideologies is a premise from where she confidently calls upon the foreign investors in particular that Tunisians experience tells them that they can work together. In order to substantiate her argument, she recalls that the Islamic, secular and communist parties fought against the dictatorship in past. The diverse groups of Tunisians, therefore, can also envision a future for the country as well.
What more can the Tunisians do to ease West's concerns? For example, Ennahda leaders have said that the new government will focus on democracy, human rights and a free-market economy in planned changes to the constitution, effectively leaving religion out of the text it will draw up. "We are against trying to impose a particular way of life," Ennahda leader Rachid Ghannouchi has been quoted as saying by Reuters. The international wire service has also said that all parties have agreed to keep the first article of the current constitution which says Tunisia's language is Arabic and its religion is Islam. "This is just a description of reality," Ghannouchi says. "It doesn't have any legal implications."
But perhaps the most profound argument in this debate has been advanced by Amita Etzioni, who served as a senior advisor to the Carter White House; taught at Columbia University, Harvard, Berkeley and is a professor at The George Washington University. Writing in The National Interest, he has asked the Americans in an article titled "Tunisia: The First Arab Islamocracy" that they should not seek to stand in the way of Tunisia if this country, as a result of a parliamentary elections, is on its way to becoming the first Muslim nation to combine the rule of Sharia with elements of democracy.
Professor Etzioni has concluded his argument by saying that the Americans "can recognise the exceptionalism of our values without assuming their universality. We should accept that Muslim republics will incorporate some moderate elements of sharia into their government...As long as they avoid the violent parts of sharia, we should hold that those countries have passed the basic litmus test to qualify as regimes with which we can work, even as we hope for and favour further developments in the direction of values we hold dear."
to be continued
(The writer is News Editor of this newspaper)