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The Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture
November 1-2, 2006
Toward Muslim Democracies

INTRODUCTION
Seymour Martin Lipset’s Political Man was the first book I read in my first course in political sociology.  I was fresh from Cairo, a first-year graduate student at UCLA, far back in 1963.  After that, it is fair to say I became obsessed with the discipline and its modern prophet. Like a Sufi follower, I pursued professor Lipset everywhere – at Berkeley and later on in various professional meetings. Then, some ten years ago, I was most fortunate to serve with him in a World Bank study group to refine and elaborate upon the newly discovered concepts of Social Capital and Civil Society as they relate to development and democratic governance. I feel both humbled and honored to be giving this lecture in honor of one of the greatest social scientists and public intellectuals of our time, Seymour Martin Lipset.

A tribute to a great man like ours is to revisit his seminal ideas and scout where they may help us in understanding the emerging - and troubling - issues of the early 21^st century. In Political Man he formulated for us the socio-economic pre-requisites of democracy. Then, shortly before he was inflicted by his debilitating illness, Lipset himself revisited his earlier formulations along with Jason M. Lakin, in their groundbreaking book, The Democratic Century. In the forty years following Lipset’s publication of Political Man, the number of democracies in the world quadrupled to more than 120, out of more than 190 member countries of the UN, covering nearly two-thirds of the world population. Little wonder that Lipset and Lakin aptly titled their work The Democratic Century.

Samuel Huntington would hail the same era as the Third Wave of democratization. Amartya Sen, the 1988 Nobel Laureate in Economics, is quoted as saying that he had no difficulty in choosing one of the preeminent developments of the period:  the rise of democracy around the world (Journal of Democracy, July 1999). Francis Fukuyama may have been a bit premature when he declared the final triumph of democracy and capitalism in his work, The End of History.  More recently, the second Bush administration would briefly make promotion of democracy a cornerstone of its foreign policy. Sadly, those policymakers could have greatly benefited from reading Lipset’s pre-requisites before jumping into the fray.

Relevant to this point is the main theme of my lecture, Toward Muslim Democracies. Curiously, in the first edition of Political Man, Lipset hardly mentions Islam or Muslims.  But as he revisits the subject in The Democratic Century, we note as many as thirty entries and ample discussion of Islam as part of an examination of cultural variables bearing on democratic governance. It is true that by that time (the early 2000’s), much of the drama on the world scene was being acted out by Muslims or people speaking in the name of Islam. Initially positing that Catholicism and Islam may have been at odds with democracy because of deep-seated antipathy to secularism, Lipset and Lakin note the sea change that had taken place, at least with respect to Latin American Catholicism. They conclude that despite sparse evidence at the time they were writing, “Islam too can change” (p 186). They cite Amartya Sen again as maintaining that cultures are never monolithic. Within each it is possible to find heterogeneity of values.  Sen identifies liberal traditions within Confucianism, Buddhism, and Islam that belie the dominant view of these cultures as illiberal and authoritarian, “To see Asian history in terms of a narrow category of authoritarian values does little justice to the rich varieties of thought in Asian traditions. Dubious history does nothing to vindicate dubious politics”

Liberal traditions surely may have been around in all cultures for a long time. However, the point at which they emerge as the dominant trend is often a matter of contending currents within each culture battling until one prevails, either through socio-economic progress or, more recently, new global conditions that enable one of the currents to prevail. World Values Survey (WVS) data over the last twenty years have shown that in the most democratic countries there are tenacious pockets of intolerance and authoritarianism. Lipset and Lakin noted this but argued that as long as strategic elites continue to hold democratic values, enhance liberal codes, and display respect for the rule of law, such pockets may survive without an imminent threat to the democratic tradition.

At this point, we may head on to our main theme, the compatibility of Islam, liberal values, and democracy.

HISTORICAL OVERATURE
One basic assertion I want to make is that all humans are changing and are changeable.  So are their cultures and social institutions –whether religions or systems of governance.  Let us start with one of the most resilient institutions in recorded history, the Roman Catholic Church. On May 17, 1835 Pope Gregory XVI issued an Encyclical entitled “Church and State” in which he asserted “He who made everything and governs by a prudent arrangement wanted order to flourish in His Church. He wanted some people to be in charge and others to be subjects and obey”. Pope Gregory was relentlessly opposed to the democratic and other modernizing reforms that were being demanded in the Papal States and throughout Europe.

Some one hundred years later, another Pope, Pius XII, on Christmas Day, 1944, issued a message titled, “Democracy and a Lasting Peace”:

“Beneath the sinister lightening of war that encompasses them, in the blazing heat of the furnace that imprisons them, the peoples have … awakened from a long torpor. They have assumed in relation to the state and those who govern a new attitude —one that questions, criticizes, distrusts. Taught by bitter experience, they are more aggressive in opposing the concentration of dictatorial power that cannot be censored or touched, and they call for a government more in keeping with the dignity of the citizens ….It is scarcely according to the teaching of the Church; it is not forbidden to prefer temperate, popular forms of government, without prejudice however to Catholic teaching on the origin and use of authority; the Church does not disapprove of any of the various forms governments, provided they are capable of securing the good of the citizens…Given that democracy, taken in its broad sense, admits various forms and can be realized  in monarchies as well as in republics…we direct our attention to the problems of democracy, examining the forms by which it should be directed if it is to be a true, healthy democracy  answering the needs of the moment.”

This sea change of attitude by the Catholic Church was no doubt caused by dramatic and cumulative events following the French Revolution. Its initial anti-democratic crusade was mostly in reaction to anti-clerical hostility. But by 1917, the Catholic Church would witness a far worse revolution; one intent on eradicating faith altogether, by ridding people of their addiction to the opium called religion. The Russian Bolsheviks made the French Jacobins seem benign. The elders of the Church must have realized that Catholic communities not only survived but indeed thrived under democratic governance - in Great Britain (a monarchy) and the United States (a republic). They learned a universal truth, that all things are relative, and change is unstoppable – a sociological law of human history.

Now, is Islam or are Muslims immune from such a law?

Many orientalists in fact are of this view; they posit the immutable, unchanging nature of Muslim societies. The late Edward Said has critically dealt with this issue at length in two separate works which are now among the classics in the field, Orientalism (1978) and Covering Islam (1981). There is no need here to repeat his forceful refutation of the essentialist and ahistorical premises of the orientalists. A late as the 1930’s, some Anglo-Saxon scholars made similar sweeping assertions about Latin, German, Slavic, and Japanese cultures. Catholics, on account of their religious beliefs -- regardless of culture, national identity, class or era -- were dismissed as incapable of embracing liberal values and democracy, on the assumption that they would always take instruction, even on secular matters, from the Pope. Those positing an essentialist view of Islam and Muslims are ignorant of their own not so distant past. 

There is another legitimate question we can pose however, regarding whether or not liberalism as a worldview is necessary for the flowering of democracy.  

ON LIBERALISM

Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, among others, argues that ‘true’ democracy is more than electoral contestation and majority rule politics. Authentic liberal values of tolerance, respect for diversity, fundamental human rights and secularism must first be institutionalized in the society at large, or at least into a majority of citizens. Otherwise, tyranny of an electoral majority would prevail. The most notorious case, Germany’s 1933 election of Hitler’s Nazi party, was the first example to enshrine the proposition of “One Man, One Vote One Time”. More recently, some consider the election of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Iran’s Ahmedinejad, and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe as examples of a charade of democratic trappings in the absence of true liberal values or institutions.

A survey of the experience of countries that democratized in the last quarter of the 20^th century is instructive.  Of the nearly seventy countries which transited from non-democratic to democratic governance since the 1974 Portuguese Revolution, many had not had a robust or even modest liberal culture prior to their transition. Franco’s Spain is a good example. Liberalism appears to be a trend that follows rather than triggers democratization.  Furthermore, and this relates to our thesis regarding Islamic societies, some of the largest among the countries to make the transformation in the so-called Third Wave of democratization are, in fact, majority Muslim countries such as Indonesia, Bangladesh and Turkey. They are now functioning as well as other democracies, that is to say with occasional problems, but maintaining rotation of power and allowing for opposition parties to operate freely. 

For a closer look at the relationship of Islam, societal worldviews and democracy we can look to another great American scholar. Some fifty years ago, a young American anthropologist, fresh out of graduate school, named Clifford Geertz, set out to test these relationships by conducting an ingenious field study in two Muslim societies separated geographically by more than 10,000 miles. These were Indonesia and Morocco. The now classic book in which Geertz summarized his findings was titled Islam Observed.

By coincidence, the two societies had just obtained political independence from their respective Dutch and French colonial masters and were busy with matters of post colonial reconstruction. Both countries had a brief experiment with Western-type democracy, but quickly devolved into authoritarian rule. That pattern became prevalent among newly independent countries in the 1960s and 1970s irrespective of whether they had Muslim majorities or not.

Geertz found nominal adherence to the textual fundamentals of Islam among the majority of people in both societies. But the every day observance of faith was quite varied, to the point that the reader might think he or she was reading about two distinct religions. Additionally, Geertz noted as much diversity of Islamic practice among Muslims in each country as he found differences between Muslims in Indonesia and Morocco. Muslims in both countries displayed as much variance in observance of their religion as one would normally find in mainly non-Muslim countries in their regional neighborhood, like the Philippines in East Asia, and the Ivory Coast in West Africa.

Now let’s fast-forward to the present day.  Despite their two very different “Islams” and a common authoritarian tradition in governance typical of the late 1950s, today both Indonesia and Morocco are steadily democratizing, and Clifford Geertz is a distinguished professor at Princeton, probably close to retirement. So, nothing in human society stays the same –whether in Christian Germany, Muslim Indonesia or Morocco.  We can also conclude with some conviction that a culture of liberalism does not seem on the evidence to be a necessary prerequisite to democracy.

STALLED DEMOCRATIC TRANSITIONS
So what about the Muslim countries seemingly mired in authoritarian rule today? Why is their transition process seemingly stalled?  And what about the disturbing impulse among some Muslims to reject pluralism and to attack ‘the other’ in the name of their faith?  Why are so many Muslims prepared to admire radical figures such as Hassan Nasrallah of Lebanon or Ahmadinejad of Iran?

First, let us dismiss the argument that something in the tenets of faith is to blame. History is replete with cults, movements and countries that have sustained non-democratic governance and espoused violence –whether in the name of Hinduism, Christianity, Shintoism or any other faith. So all religions are capable of being used for this sort of political manipulation. What we must seek instead, are the historical and structural features of a given moment that make people ripe for responding to extremism or demagoguery. 

But, some may argue, haven’t Western societies come to value the separation of ‘church and state’ in ways that make it less likely that religion will be used to manipulate popular sentiment? Isn’t it better to leave religion to the realm of “absolutes”, whether worldly morality or otherworldly salvation.  Tolerance and democracy, on the other hand are about mundane relativities, that which is individually and collectively achievable in the world. One is about commands and the “Sacred”. The other is about the profane, and human striving and failings.

To reconcile these opposites, it took Christian Europe a hundred year war, then a thirty year war, then several less celebrated, though no less bloody conflicts among Christians, the last of which was in Northern Ireland a short time ago. It has taken Europe five centuries, a religious Reformation, and several socio-political revolutions before a modicum of reconciliation of state and religion evolved. Even though it was under no external challenge or colonial rule, the European odyssey has been arduous, bloody, and protracted.

It was only recently that a noted sociologist, Robert Bellah celebrated the historic reconciliation of the Sacred and the Profane in his 1975 classic, The Broken Covenant: American Civil  Religion in Times of Trial. Bellah and others detected a new fusion between the sacred and the profane. Religion is no longer the only source of the sacred. Nor is it immune to the secular. Americans are fond of valorizing their principle of the separation of church and state, and demanding that others operate their societies in a like manner. But Bellah argues that such separation was never complete and is unlikely to ever be fully achieved.  Meanwhile, other social institutions like the military, universities, and even commerce have become competing sources of the sacred.

Could it be that Muslims have to go through a similar odyssey before they come to peace with themselves and hence with the rest of the World?

Some eminent Muslim thinkers, including Mohamed Abdou at the beginning of the 20^th century and Gamal El-Banna at mid-century have held this view; and indeed embarked on ambitious reform projects. Like all innovators, the reformists were resisted, isolated, and marginalized by the powers that be, whether the conservative religious Establishment (e.g. Al-Azhar in Egypt and the Wahabis in Saudi Arabia) or the radical Islamists (e.g.. the Muslim Brotherhood, Jihadists and the like.) The early reform attempts have never realized their potential.  In great measure this is because they coincided not only with local resistance, but also with external obstacles --An onslaught of Western colonialism on the abode of Islam at the end of the 19^th century and the Israeli challenge at mid-century. In moments of external threat such as these, it is usually the voices of extremists, rather than those of reformers, that have the power to rally popular support. 

In the last few years and months, we have seen a replay of this scenario. As Israel unleashed its efficient war machine to punish Hezbollah, in the process destroying large swaths of Lebanon, it was the radical Hezbollah irregulars, not state armies that stood and resisted for thirty-three days. Predictably, the Hezbollah leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah became an instant folk hero to millions of Muslims around the world. In an August opinion poll among Egyptians, for example, conducted by the Cairo-based Ibn Khaldun Center, Nasrallah ranked highest in importance among 30 Muslim public figures –followed, though at some distance, by Iranian President Ahmadinejad, Khaled Meshaal of Palestinian Hamas, Osama bin Laden, and Mahdi Akef of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.  None of the current Arab heads of state made the list of the 10 most frequently mentioned public figures. Nor for that matter did any of the moderate Islamic reformists. Of the three secular names to make the list, two were imprisoned political leaders, in Israeli and Egyptian jails.

The pattern here is clear, and for me it reflects a deep sense of anger and protest. The leading figures are militant, activist, and Islamic---in that order. Recall that the eminently secular Yassir Arafat was once equally popular when he was perceived to be standing up to Israeli and American military might. He lost popularity as his PLO came to be seen as an entrenched, self-seeking authority, no longer fighting the peoples’ battles.   We read too much into the current mood to portray the current sentiments as a ‘return to religion’. To my mind, what it does reflect is a deep yearning for someone or some force to pull Muslims out of their position of weakness - a sense that they are always on the receiving end of events.

It is remarkable for the Egyptian sample of our recent poll, that President Mubarak ranked 12^th in order of perceived importance with merely 14 % placing him at a rank of 10 or higher.  Equally remarkable is that the top two most popular figures, a Lebanese and an Iranian, were both of the Shiite sect, while Egyptians are nearly all Sunni.  Though bitter rivals for 1400 years, followers of both sects seem far more united than their leaders in rallying around the Shiite-led Hizbullah resistance to Israel.

It seems clear that some higher or deeper values than simple religious identity are at work here. I would submit that justice, dignity, and self determination are those salient values. Leaders and ideologies that offer hope for a restoration of these lost qualities will garner a following, at the expense of the values that you in a prosperous, secure and free West would hope to see more salient, i.e. tolerance and democracy.

One may speculate whether or not the equation would be different for non-Muslim societies if faced by a prolonged existential challenge.  Let me venture some brief thoughts on the issue.

HOME SECURITY AND LIBERTY

Two years after 9/11, former US President Jimmy Carter invited me and 60 other human rights activists from all six continents to Atlanta to deliberate the fate of fundamental freedoms in light of the open-ended and draconian security measures enacted by Congress in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. A part of the Carter initiative was for a ten-member delegation to fly to Washington to present the case of the world human rights community to the White House, Congress, the State and Defense Departments, as well as the national media.  Our plea was to repeal the most draconian of the Patriot Act measures, based on the documented abuses which we had witnessed in the wake of similar laws elsewhere in the world. 

With few exceptions in Congress and the media, everyone we met with reiterated the same view: when it comes to “national security ” all other considerations or personal rights or freedoms have to be set aside. Five years after 9/11 and three years after that conversation in Washington, the Patriot Act and the rest of the Home Security package are still in effect. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Human Rights Watch, and Human Rights First (HRF), among numerous others have since added their voices to that of President Carter, but still to no avail.

Americans seem prepared to set aside their most cherished values when their survival and security are perceived as under threat.  I ask each of you to wonder whether or not some individual Americans may also have resorted to acts of violence or armed insurrection, had parts of your territory been occupied, homes and farms taken away by settlers, etc.  That suicide bombers appeared on the Palestinian scene some 50 years after the first occupation is perhaps something to be pondered. 

Now, would any of us attribute the current mood in the US, or the policies of its leaders to characteristics of the Christian faith?  The US President prides himself not only on being a good Christian but also on consulting with God before making important decisions. Despite having involved America and others in three wars during his tenure in office, we do not hear anyone blaming this war-intensive foreign policy on the religion of Christianity. 

 The veterans among you who are above fifty may remember when other popular Arab leaders and movements arose, like that of Nasser and Arab nationalism. Their popularity was rooted in their defiance of and resistance to external powers, just as Muslim militants are rallying the masses today. Something similar happened in Poland   vis-à-vis the Soviet presence after the Second World War. As early secular uprisings ran out of breath or were brutally crushed, the combination of a Polish Pope in the Vatican, a Catholic Church in Poland, and a splinter trade union (Solidarity) were able to resume the anti-Soviet resistance and ultimately bring down the Communist government.

Thus, when people are determined to pursue a cause, they will fight for it under nearly any flag and use any means. I contend that to be the case at present in the Arab regions of the Muslim World. Like the rest of the Muslim world in the last three centuries, Arab lands were occupied and its peoples subjected to foreign rule.  Though nearly all had been emancipated from direct colonial rule by the mid twentieth  century, now they find themselves once again at the receiving end of frequent military interventions. In fact, those interventions numbered over 15 during the 50-year period from 1956-2006. While all the major Western powers have at one time or another participated in such military interventions, the US holds the lion’s share, accounting for a total of ten military interventions, or an average of one every five years.  Imagine for a moment living your life, trying to raise a family or pursue a livelihood in a region with that experience of vulnerability and violation. 

Arabs justifiably feel victimized by the West, and Muslims are easily persuaded that they are targeted because of their Muslim identity. This helps to explain as well the hyper-sensitivity to even a casual or seemingly trivial insult coming from a Western quarter, such as the Danish cartoons and the recent remarks of Pope Benedict. 

To be sure, during the Islamic Middle Ages (8^th-12^th centuries) much harsher debates took place among Muslims and between them and theologians of other religions without such sensitivity. But these were the very centuries in which Islamic civilization was at its zenith and Muslims had a sense of themselves as powerful and secure. Today’s Muslims, or at least many of the Arabs among them feel the opposite:  weak and therefore supremely insecure.

The question therefore is not whether Islam, tolerance, and democracy are compatible, for indeed they are for the two-thirds of contemporary Muslims who live free of occupation and under democratically elected governments. Our question should be: what other values do 21^st century Arab Muslims define as their priority?  The answer I suggest is that the existential issue of dignified survival is paramount among Muslims and Arabs today.

A glance at the map of violent reaction to both the Danish cartoon controversy and to Pope Benedict’s remarks underscores my point. The more developed, freer and/or richer Muslim countries such as Malaysia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Turkey did not react as massively or violently.  Even within the same country, observers and pollsters noted significant class differences in attitudes toward the West and the liberal values associated with it. The University of Michigan-based World Values Survey (WVS), conducted in several Muslim majority countries (Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Morocco) between 2001 and 2004 confirmed this conclusion.. The better educated and well off were significantly more disposed to democratic values and basic freedoms. In fact, the samples from Muslim countries were within 3-7 percentage points from their Western counterparts on nearly all democratic values.

This is something that Lipset would have readily predicted .The marked differences between Muslim and Western societies, however, were in values bearing on marital, gender and sexual mores. These empirical findings led Ronald Inglehart, the principal architect of the WVS, to conclude that if there is any ‘Clash of Civilizations’ at all, it is mainly in the areas of gender and sexuality, which in Muslim societies remain traditional - about where the United States was in the 1950s, for example. 

TOWARD MUSLIM DEMOCRACIES
This last observation by Inglehart pinpoints the crux of the matter:  there will most likely be a time lag of two generations or so, before the Arab Muslim world completes its transition to modernity and democracy. Military incursions, occupations, and thwarted economic development could further delay the process. Or enlightened Western policy could help it to fast-forward.  Which will it be?

We would do well at this point to recall that some Muslim countries such as Egypt were on a course for early transition, as early as the second half of the 19^th century, or according to Huntington, the first wave of democratization. Egypt had its first constitution and elected parliament in 1866. So did Tunisia, and Turkey followed shortly after. Other countries in the region were part of the second wave in the inter-war period (1918- 1939), like Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan, albeit under Mandate tutelage. However, that nearly century-long liberal age was aborted by the very Western powers that had inspired it in the first place. The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 undercut the strength and Western alliances of Arab liberals. Their failure to manage the conflict with Israel and the Western powers behind it heralded their demise and the coming to power of military and populist regimes.

The latter promised not only to liberate Palestine, but also to bring about rapid economic development and social justice. Throughout the 1950s and the 1960s vast majorities were mesmerized by these populist promises and seemed willing to trade their nascent democratic freedoms in return. For a while, it looked as if this populist bargain would work. However they faced an even more devastating defeat under the leadership of the populist regimes at the hands of Israel in 1967.  This defeat undermined the legitimacy of the populist autocrats and ultimately gave rise to militant religiously-based movements in one country after another.

For several decades the old populist autocrats and the new challenging militant theocrats have been locked into protracted conflict over people’s hearts and minds. The Islamist-led revolution in Iran encouraged Muslim militants elsewhere to escalate their challenge against entrenched but failing autocrats. Violent bouts of that conflict have increasingly spilled over to foreign lands, from Afghanistan to the US, UK, and Spain.  Some of the extreme wings of this militant movement have concluded that the local autocrats are nothing but clients who are propped up and kept in power as agents of the Western powers. This is the basic message of al-Qa’eda and its leader Osama bin-Laden.

Something else much less dramatic has been happening in the regional backstage, no doubt stimulated by the swift march of democratic developments in Southern and Eastern Europe. A budding liberal movement has been making some strides recently. The mushrooming of over twenty Arab satellite TV channels is boosting this new liberal trend. While still far outgunned by the autocrats who control state power, and the theocrats who control hundreds of thousands of mosques, the liberal democrats hold the appeal of the future. The breadth of these undercurrents became boldly apparent in 2005. An unprecedented number of elections took place in the Arab Middle East, 13 of them in all. Initially, Muslim militants in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and Egypt did not welcome   democracy, which they depicted as a Western gimmick across the region. To their and everyone else’s surprise, their calls for a boycott were not heeded. With the exception of Egypt, voters turned out at a rate exceeding 60% in each of these countries.

Seeing this popular hunger for participation, moderate Islamists quickly changed their position and rushed to register candidates and campaign in earnest.

In all five countries, including Egypt, Islamists did better than anyone expected. Palestinian Hamas triumphed with a plurality (43%), and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood garnered 20% of the seats (60 percent of those they contested). Likewise, Hizballah in Lebanon and a host of Islamic parties in Iraq gained enough votes to make them necessary partners in their countries’ post election governments.  Rather than reading into these patterns an ominous sign of rising extremism, as some in the West persist in doing, we should understand it as the expression of legitimate frustration with ruling regimes that have failed to meet their people’s most basic aspirations, whose brutality and corruption have become rampant. Nowhere is this as clear as in the Egyptian case.

In the first parliamentary elections under Hosni Mubarak, in 1984, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) had no more than 2% of the votes of the 58% who turned out. That was roughly 1.2% of all registered voters and they got only one seat out of the 444 elected that year. Two decades later, in 2005, under the same enduring President, the MB garnered 20% of the votes of the 23% who turned out. That was roughly 5% of all registered voters, but it translated into 88 out of the 444 seats in the Chamber. To put it differently, by merely doubling their share of electoral votes, the MB multiplied their parliamentary representation 88 times during the 25 years reign of President Mubarak. The thorough examination of these results is quite revealing and should have assuaged current fears in Western capitals. For one thing, this MB ascendance is partly a function of very low voters turnout, as well as the truly remarkable electoral skills mastered over the two decades by the MB.

Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP) has wittingly or unwittingly contributed to this outcome. Insisting upon denying the Brotherhood a legal license to operate

publicly as a political party, the Brotherhood resorted to the mosque as a venue to reach its potential constituents. They filed its candidates as independents, each using the same simple slogan, ”Islam is the Solution.” In 2005, voters and observers alike knew exactly what the real identity and affiliation of the candidates was. Meanwhile, using the Emergency Laws in effect since the 1981 assassination of President Sadat, the Mubarak regime has continued to virtually place other secular opposition parties and civil society forces under “House Arrest” by denying them the freedom to organize in public spaces. Faced with no real choice but the discredited ruling NDP or the MB, some 77% of the registered voters opted to stay home. It was a dramatic collective silent protest against the miserable state of diminishing politics under the protracted autocracy of the Mubarak regime.

 Something very similar, though on a different scale, took place in Palestine, with the ascendance of Islamic Hamas, which is a branch of the MB. This may also be read as in keeping with regional trends, as in Turkey and Morocco where moderate Islamic parties scored impressive gains in late 2002. Vali Nasr observed a similar trend in places as distant as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Bangladesh. He documented voting data of the three successive elections following the end of autocratic rule in four South and Southeast Asian countries during the last 16 years (1990-2005) from which he showed that after an initial surge, the glow of Islamic parties gradually diminishes, but with an oscillating share of 15 to 35 % of their respective national electorates.

Vali Nasr concludes, “In these Muslim societies, the vital center of politics is likely to belong neither to secularist and leftist parties nor to Islamists. More likely to rule the strategic middle will be political forces that integrate Muslim values and moderate Islamic politics into broader right of center platforms that go beyond exclusively religious concerns. Such forces can appeal to a broad cross-section of voters and create a stable nexus between religious and secular drivers of electoral politics” (The Rise of Muslim Democracy, The Journal of Democracy, pp 14-15).

With the cases of Turkey, Jordan, Kuwait, Yemen and Egypt in the Middle East and Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania in North Africa, we observe similar budding trends. The question is, will Western democracies embrace and nurture or shun and reject such trends?

I can think of several reasons why the West should be encouraging moderate Islamic forces which opt to be part of the democratic mainstream. For one thing, it will moderate the Islamists even more as they will have to appeal to wider circles beyond the true believers if they want to garner more votes.  For another, as they get legitimated by others at home and abroad, and continue to participate in electoral politics, they in fact culturally legitimate democracy as a value and a practice. For a third reason, it would ward off the accusation of a Western “double standard”  i.e. accepting democracy only if it brings pro-Western parties to power .

We believe that in due course even Islamists will have to deal with the West if only out of self-interest. Turkey’s Islamic-based Justice and Development Party (JDP) is a case in point. More than its avowedly secular predecessors in power, the JDP has been pragmatic and forthcoming on issues that had bedeviled Turkey’s relations vis a vis the outside world like Cyprus, the Kurds, and accession to the EU.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, our concern must not be with a supposed incompatibility of freedom and Islam, or for that matter democracy or liberal values and Islam. There is a universal hunger for all three, and Muslims are part of that universality. Two thirds of the world’s Muslim already live under democratically elected governments. The one-third which is not yet enjoying participatory governance find themselves in that situation, not because of Islamic or Arab cultural exceptionalism; rather, it is because of autocratic regimes and external challenges to their territory and identity, all of which have been rampant in the last fifty years. Patriotism, nationalism, and now Islamism are variations on the same theme of existential resistance.  Arab autocrats have amplified and manipulated those genuine fears to xenophobic levels in recent years.

In an earlier period, those same autocrats deluded their peoples with a populist bargain of national liberation, development and social justice in exchange for giving up basic freedoms and democracy. Present day autocrats are continuing to bargain with their people: their very existence and identity in exchange for yet again foregoing freedom and democracy. With the same cynicism, Arab autocrats are trying to strike another bargain with the West: either you support us (autocrats) or face the deluge (Muslim fanatics). 

Of the three forces competing for Arab public space, autocrats have a monopoly of state coercive powers and resources; and have used them brutally. Theocrats have the monopoly of the mosque and the claim of virtue, and have used them shrewdly and loudly. Democrats are squeezed in between, outgunned by the autocrats and outnumbered by the theocrats, but with claims of legitimacy and the support of a silent majority.

So, on balance where does this leave us?  Seymour Martin Lipset and his disciples had a favorite cheer: “We are not rough; we are not tough; but boy are we determined.”

If I may conclude by paraphrasing that great political guru, and speaking as a front-line activist, I would say: “We Arab Democrats are not as brutal as our autocratic rulers; we are not as numerous as their theocratic challengers, but we are determined to activate our silent majority, and we shall prevail.”