Published in OpinionJournal.com Nov 26 '03

(Editor's note: On June 30, 2000, Egyptian authorities charged Mr. Ibrahim and several colleagues with crimes allegedly connected to his administration of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies; officials closed the center the next day. After a long legal fight and 15 months in prison, Mr. Ibrahim was cleared of all charges by the Court of Cassation, Egypt's highest civilian judicial body, on March 18, 2003. The Ibn Khaldun Center reopened on June 30, three years to the day after the arrests.)

The world has changed forever in those three years that I was under attack in Egypt. Few can now doubt that democracy, peace and development are interlinked and must be sought together, especially in my part of the world. This is what we at the Ibn Khaldun Center had been saying for 15 years before the state prosecutor forced a hiatus on our activities three years ago. We have come in for our share of criticism, some of it defamatory, but we have never wavered from this message. I personally will promote and defend it as long as my health permits, because it is true and it badly needs to be heard as widely as possible.

I am now in my 60s, and am hoping that after me and my contemporaries will come a second and then a third generation of nonviolent freedom fighters--not only in Egypt, but throughout the larger Arab and Muslim worlds as well--who will speak this truth. Already some of these young people are on the scene, saying things that could not be said 10 or even five years ago.

Our region is passing through troubled times, whose signs and symptoms are well known and have received ample publicity, especially since 9/11. There is a strong feeling of malaise and humiliation. Some of that stems from the aftermath of the war in Iraq, but there are longer-term causes as well. Among them are the stifling of debate and discussion and the way citizens find themselves cut off from fairly and fully presented information about the world. This is connected in turn to the lack of honest print and electronic media that will let Arabs and Muslims hear the truth about the problems that beset their countries, and about those who rule these countries.

Official restrictions on political discourse have burdened the Middle East for a long time. Part of the Ibn Khaldun Center's problem was its determination to speak out and to provide platforms for diverse points of view. The channels open to us were limited in number and scope, but we did our best to make the most of them. Despite the limits within which we worked, and despite the always peaceful character of everything we published, some of the powers that be decided that they could not tolerate us.

So they arrested me and closed the center, and civil society in Egypt--hardly robust to begin with--took a severe beating. The Ibn Khaldun Center staff were muzzled and intimidated for a while, but thanks to the persistence of some very courageous people on staff and elsewhere in Egypt, plus supporters outside the country, a world-wide campaign to defend the center and its work began to take shape. And eventually, with their help and that of organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the center emerged triumphant.

The Court of Cassation's March 18 opinion was not merely a victory for one wrongly accused man or institution; this was a victory for an agenda--the cause of democracy and the rule of law--that the world now realizes is the only real alternative to Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and their ilk.

Democracy is the way forward. It is the only sure way to keep the Middle East from going to the brink of war every few years. In an article recently published in the Washington Post, I counted the number of times that the United States or other Western powers have had to form military coalitions or use large-scale armed force in the region to avert or resolve a problem. From 1958, when President Eisenhower sent U.S. Marines to Lebanon, up through the Iraq war of 2003, the rate of military interventions has averaged one every seven years. God knows when the next one will be, but without democracy they are sure to continue, and that is no light matter. It is time for us as Arabs to put our own houses in order.

There are a thousand and one difficulties facing us as we work to institute democracy in the Arab world and the larger Middle East. And yet what choice do we have except to try once, twice or as often as we must? Government by consent, respect for human rights, and support for the rule of law are the only things that can finally and securely protect our countries, our region and the world against the threats of terrorism and of crises that compel outsiders to come and use military force on our shores.

How do I rate the prospects for democracy in the Middle East? I think that they are surprisingly good. I am well aware of those who marshal evidence to show that instituting democracies and open societies in the region, or perhaps even in the larger Muslim world, is difficult or impossible. The difficulties are well known and undeniable. But they can all be overcome. In previous decades, authoritative voices said that Germany, Japan, Slavic countries and even Catholic societies would never, could never, be democratic. I am not speaking of popular prejudices here, but of high-level scholarship and expert consensus. Batteries of learned naysayers honestly believed that there was something about German, Japanese or Slavic culture, or about Catholicism, that was fundamentally and unchangeably hostile to democracy and democratic values.

Experience, of course, proved that these doubts were not as well founded as they seemed. At the Ibn Khaldun Center, we are convinced that similar doubts about the potential for democracy in Arab cultures, the Middle East, and the Muslim world will ultimately prove just as feebly grounded. Indeed, I am heartened by the instances of modest progress toward greater political openness that we are already seeing. The successes are limited, but real. The most prominent has come in Turkey, which recently witnessed an alternation in power following a free and vigorously contested election--with a party of self-avowed "Muslim democrats" now running the government. Less dramatic examples of increasing political competition can be found in Morocco, Bahrain, Jordan and Kuwait. Movement forward has so far been tenuous and uneven, but these countries--and also Yemen--do appear to be making some headway, at least.