New Delhi, February 05: In a Paris conference two years ago, a US academic acerbically asked, “What can we say about an Arab world that has contributed less to human learning in the past 100 years than Bangladesh?” The Moroccan diplomat next to me merely nodded his head. The Arabs are the world’s wounded civilisation.
“We have no leaders to whom our children can look up to,” was a common line in every Arab country you visited.
From Algiers to Aden, they saw themselves kicked around by Israel, suppressed by the West and betrayed by their rulers. You could count on them to recount the strangest conspiracies to explain their plight. Such has been the Arab Street’s despair that it has looked to traditional rivals such as Turkey and Iran for leadership. And it is from this rot that the likes of Osama bin Laden have arisen.
The Arab polity has been caught in a devil’s compact. Small ruling circles persuaded the West — and their own middle classes — to support them in return for keeping militant Islam at bay. What emerged, argue scholars such as Sorbonne’s Burhan Ghalioun, were arrogant and “corrupt elites backed by Western countries”.
One result was repression. The EIU Democracy Index 2010 rated 16 of the 20 Arab countries as authoritarian. Of the remainder, Iraq and Lebanon were arguably too chaotic to be labelled. Another result was corruption. Economic reforms enriched a few families, says Iraqi sociologist Faleh Abdul-Jabbar, “creating a bizarre alliance of dictatorship plus a new business class created from that same self-same elite”. The final result was Islamic militancy. But this reinforced Western willingness to uphold such regimes.
The danger inherent in such a closed circuit of political decay has been obvious to all. The Bush administration’s “democracy by invasion” was an attempt, driven by the shock of 9/11, to find an alternative.
–thelinkpaper.ca