Text of lecture delivered at Oxford Day School, Department of Continuing Education, Rewley House, 7th October 2000
After the momentous events that have taken place in Serbia this week, the last non-democratic government in Europe has been removed and a revolution that started just over a decade ago against communism – a short time ago we celebrated the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall – has achieved full fruition.
It is still too early to judge the eventual outcome of current developments in Yugoslavia, but there is no doubt that we are facing some momentous changes in Eastern Europe. After initially rejecting the outcome of the elections held on 24 September, two days ago President Slobodan Milosevic left office amidst widespread demonstrations throughout Serbia, and the withdrawal of Russian support. In the light of these developments, there is a great deal of optimism about the dawn of a new age of democracy, at least in Europe.
However, the terrible massacre of the Palestinians in the occupied territories – killing scores of people and wounding thousands – has shown us that the situation is quite different in the Middle East. Last month, right-wing Israeli politician Ariel Sharon made a provocative visit to the Al-Aqa Compound, which is regarded as a holy place by Muslims worldwide, while extremist Zionists also claim that it was the site of their Temple which was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. As anticipated, Sharon’s visit sparked protests and riots that Israeli forced put down with live ammunition and tear gas, which resulted in many casualties. The Israeli police and defence forces have reportedly fired tens of thousands rounds of ammunition, which killed a large number of Palestinian civilians and militants.
It is interesting to note that while the media referred to the uprising a couple of days ago in Serbia as people power challenging dictatorship, the uprising of the Palestinians has been described as violence, disturbances or terrorism. The media has on the whole been silent about the brutal suppression of unarmed Palestinians by the ruthless war machine of the Israeli government, making use of live ammunition, even tanks, shells and helicopter-gunships to fight against a civilian uprising. The Israeli helicopters shelled a big residential apartment bloc because they said it housed suspected stone throwers.
This does not mean that the Palestinians are without blame. The attacks on Israeli settlements and civilians must be condemned as strongly as one condemns the killing of young Palestinians by Israeli soldiers. What the latest developments show, however, is the feeling of total desperation by the Palestinians who have been under brutal occupation for a long time, and whose prospects and standard of living have in fact diminished since the start of the Peace Process.
Many Israelis are genuine in wishing to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbours, provided that they can hold on to a large part of the territories that they occupied in 1967 war, can declare Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, can retain their settlements on Palestinian lands, and can prevent the return of more than four million Palestinian refugees to Palestine.
On the other hand, the Palestinians argue that UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which were reaffirmed in writing at the beginning of the Madrid Conference and the Peace Process to form the basis of any settlement between the two sides, must be honoured by both sides. That means that the Israelis must hand back the areas that they occupied in 1967 – with minor adjustments – and must allow the establishment of a Palestinian state on the remaining 22 percent of Palestinian territory, with East Jerusalem as its capital. These differences seem to be irreconcilable on the surface, but if there is going to be a lasting peace in the Middle East, this large gap between the two sides must be narrowed.
Both sides must realise that this cannot be achieved through violence and bloodshed. The Palestinians must admit that they will not be able to defeat the state of Israel, and the Israelis must also realize that they cannot make one million Palestinian Arabs in the state of Israel and about four million Palestinians in the occupied territories – including hundreds of thousands in East Jerusalem – disappear.
They should know by now that any hope of domestic peace and security for the Israelis would be illusory without addressing the just aspirations of the Palestinians. They have to treat them as their equals and find a fair and lasting solution that meets with the approval or acquiescence of both sides. It should also be remembered that Jerusalem that is the main bone of contention between the Israelis and the Palestinians is also sacred to Christians, as well as Muslims, and their rights should also be taken into consideration.
The fact is that if the Israelis and the Palestinians could find a way of overcoming the current hurdles, the future could be very bright for both communities. An Israel at peace with its Arab neighbours could enrich not only the Israelis, but also the Palestinians and the rest of the Middle East as a whole. Exchanging Israeli scientific and technological know-how with the enormous human and financial resources of the Arab world could be quite complementary and could benefit both sides. What is needed at the present juncture is a far-sighted leadership that relies not on force, but on non-violent, active campaign for peace and justice.
Jews, Christians and Muslims who adhere to the spiritual tenets of their faiths are second to none in their profound commitment to peace and justice. The greetings in both Hebrew and Arabic convey Peace (Shalom, Salam) upon the recipients. For Christians who also consider the Holy Lands as their sacred grounds, Jesus of Nazareth was the Prince of Peace. However, for decades, Israeli and Palestinian leaders have resorted to violence to achieve their objectives, while the Christians have watching passively as bystanders. The conflict has brought the Israeli and Palestinians and the region as a whole nothing but pain, suffering, misery, and death. The time has come for both sides to experiment with real and meaningful peace.
Looking at the Middle East as a whole, one can see that the entire region is undergoing tremendous change. More than 60-65 percent of the population of the Middle East is under 25 years of age. In recent years, we have also seen the passing of an older generation of rulers, to be replaced with younger and more educated rulers. We have had the death of Amir of Bahrain Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa (March 1999), King Husayn of Jordan (February 1999), King Hasan of Morocco (July 1999), Hafiz al-Asad of Syria (June 2000), and the removal of the Amir of Qatar Sheikh Khalifa (June 1995), and all of them have been replaced by their young and mainly Western-educated sons. Within the next few years, we are bound to see this process to continue in Saudi Arabia, in other Persian Gulf countries and in Palestine.
Before starting to look at the prospects for democratic reforms in the Middle East, I wish to make a few introductory remarks that might be relevant to our expectations concerning the pace of democratic reform in the Middle East, and whether democracy is compatible with Islam. Any talk about democracy and the Middle East is often treated with derision and disbelief.
The Middle East has been described by one commentator as “one of the least democratic regions of the world and, many believe, the one with the bleakest prospects for the future.” (Steven R. Dorr, Global Transformation and the Third World, 1993) The current Turkish prime minister, Bulent Ecevit, may be speaking from first-hand experience when he claimed that even though “the winds of democratization have been blowing all over the world… Yet not a leaf has been stirred with these winds in the Middle East.” (Bulent Ecevit, 1993).
Of the explanations offered for the lack of democracy in the Middle East, Elie Kedourie’s claim that “the idea of democracy is quite alien to the mind-set of Islam,” was among the most audacious and most controversial, even though it did gain currency in certain circles. (Kedourie, Democracy and Arab Political Culture, 1992). Similar arguments about the incompatibility of democracy with Islam in general, and Arab culture in particular, have also been made by Bernard Lewis (Islam and the West, 1994) and Fu’ad Ajami (The Dream Palace of the Arabs, 1998).
Such authors find no difficulty in subscribing to the assertion made by Lord Balfour some eighty years ago that, unlike western nations which display “capacities for self-government,” one can “never find traces of self-government,” among “Orientals” nor any capacity for it. (Walid W. Kazziha, Palestine in the Arab Dilemma, 1997).
Of course, since then, we have seen that many countries, including India to which those words referred, have been able to govern themselves better than when they were governed by their colonizers. No doubt, in eighty years’ time – and hopefully much earlier than that – Kedourie’s remarks may also seem to be as outdated and shallow as Lord Balfour’s remarks seem to us today.
However, a number of much more sophisticated treatments of the question have also been attempted, most notably by John L. Esposito and John O. Voll (Islam and Democracy, 1996), Ghassan Salamé and his collaborators (Salamé, The Foundations of the Arab State, 1994), Goldberg and his co-authors (Goldberg et. al., Another development: basic principles and practical applications, 1993), Norman Daniel (, 1993), David Garnham and Mark Tassler (Democracy, War and Peace in the Middle East, 1995), among others. In these discussions, a more sustained effort had been made to understand and explain the problem, adopting a multidisciplinary approach more fitting to this multi-faceted question.
One cannot deny that at the moment, few countries in the Middle East can be described as fully democratic. Even if we employ a more limited conception of democracy based on minimalist interpretation of the concept of the “rule of the people,” (as the existence of stable and self-sustaining systems of governance within a given society, through institutions that permit the peaceful management and resolution of conflicts on a broadly acceptable basis) the Middle East registers very low marks. This is an indication of how serious the problem is. And this is not just a question of image and western “misperceptions,” as some have argued (Jillian Shwedler, ed., Towards Civil Society in the Middle East: A Primer, 1995), but a very real problem.
Some leaders and political analysts are hoping that democracy can be transplanted from the West into the Middle East, or it can be established during the tenure of a single president or ruler. Of course, anything that is established that quickly will have no roots in the society and will wither as the result of the slightest adverse wind. On the other hand, many people in the Middle East feel that some political leaders in the West are trying to impose their version of democracy and human rights on the Middle East with an almost missionary and crusading zeal, often by resorting to force, and that their definition of democracy and human rights is not applied uniformly to all the countries in the Middle East.
Sometime ago, I was reading the lead story on the front page of the New York Times on Sunday, written by Judith Miller, supposedly a Middle East specialist, on the latest State Department report on terrorism. It is interesting to note the way she treated Iran, Syria and Turkey. Iran is a terrorist state, she wrote. Syria is a terrorist state, but could stop being a terrorist state if it begins to support the US-sponsored Middle East peace process. She went out of her way to praise Turkey for its positive experiences in overcoming terror.
That is pretty remarkable because Iran has at least regular parliamentary and presidential elections, which even though not perfect give its executive rulers a degree of legitimacy, while there are no elections in Syria or in most of the Persian Gulf littoral states. Turkey has one of the worst records in the world of state terrorism against the Kurds, as the result of which about 30,000 Kurds have died during the last few decades. The Kurds are not still officially recognised and they cannot be taught or publish in their own language. It is clear that Miller’s judgement was based mainly on political considerations and which countries support the US-sponsored Middle East peace process, rather than on any objective or academic criteria.
T. S. Eliot said that people cannot stand too much reality. Therefore, they resort to myths. One such myth that is very prevalent in the West, even among liberal thinkers, academics and journalists, is about the long-standing democratic traditions of the West as opposed to the so-called “Eastern despotism.” In most Western writings on the subject of democracy, reference is made to the discovery of democracy in ancient Greece. Then, with a giant leap of some two thousand years, that period in Greece is linked with the writings of Charles Louis de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Locke and David Hume, and with Western democracies that have developed during the past two centuries in the West.
After the end of the golden age of philosophy in Greece and with the emergence of Alexander the Great and later the Roman Empire, the theory and practice of democracy were almost totally neglected and the West lost its contact with Greek classics. The ancient Greek learning was revived only under Islam when nearly all the great ancient Greek texts were translated into Arabic during the first few centuries of Islamic rule. It was not until many centuries later when, through Latin translations of the Arabic texts, ancient Greek ideas were reintroduced to Western Europe. Arabic translations of the Greek texts and Muslim commentaries and additions to those texts formed the bridge between ancient Greece and post-Renaissance Europe.
Western democracy evolved from simple beginnings. The oldest form of democracy in the West definitely starts with Magna Carta (the Great Charter). It was a royal charter of rights agreed by King John of England at Runnymede on 15 June 1215, reissued with alterations in 1216, 1217 and 1225, under the threat of civil war. However, Magna Carta was not about rule by the people or democracy as we know it today, but was an attempt to make peace between the unpopular king and a group of rebel barons. It promised the protection of church rights, protection for the barons from illegal imprisonment, access to swift and impartial justice, and limitations on feudal payments to the Crown, to be implemented through a council of 25 barons. However, neither side stood by their commitments, and the Charter was annulled by Pope Innocent III, leading to the First Barons’ War.
This does not undermine Magna Carta’s importance as a very revolutionary, historic document that laid the foundations of the contemporary powers of the parliament and important legal principles such as habeas corpus. It also served as a model for future developments of the concept of democracy. By declaring the sovereign to be subject to the rule of law, and documenting liberties held by “free men”, Magna Carta provided the foundations of individual rights in England.
When we talk about democracy as a form of democratic government, as opposed to ancient theories of democracy or relations between kings and barons, we should realize that it is a new phenomenon in the whole world. The French revolution of 1789 is sometimes regarded as the first starting point of democracy. Yet the effect of the French “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,” which affirmed the principles of civil liberty and of equality before the law, was short-lived and was followed by the imperial reign of Napoleon and his successors.
The U.S. “Declaration of Independence”, which asserted the right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, was the most brilliant invention of the late eighteenth century. The U.S. “Declaration of Independence”, the US Constitution and “The Bill of Rights” made major contributions to the development of democracy in the rest of the world, but they have also evolved with time and what we understand from them now is quite different from what was understood at the time when they were formulated.
Despite their lofty aspirations and optimistic statements, asserting that all men are created equal, it should be borne in mind that again, rather like ancient Greece, this equality did not initially extend to the slaves or to women. The suffragette movement in the United States and England became successful only after the First World War, not till 1937 in France and not till 1975 in Switzerland. In Britain in 1918 women over the age of 30 who satisfied certain conditions gained the vote, and in 1928 suffrage was granted to women over the age of 21. The history of the suffragette movement in the United States also corresponds quite closely to the developments in Britain.
Even those far-sighted and visionary individuals who drafted the American Constitution saw democracy in a different light from how we see it today. In 1776, in the context of the Virginia Senate, Thomas Jefferson argued that only the ‘wisest men’ should be Senators, and that they should be, ‘when chosen, perfectly independent of their electors’, because, ‘choice by the people themselves is not generally distinguished for its wisdom’. And that Senators should be, ‘appointed for life, or to any thing rather than a mere creation by and dependence on the people.’[1]
In 1763, John Adams (who was to help draft the Massachusetts constitution) claimed that, ‘Democracy will soon degenerate into anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes, and no man’s life or property or reputation or liberty will be safe’. Not surprisingly, in the constitution of Massachusetts not only were the electors of the Senate to possess more wealth than those of the Lower House, but those for the Governor were restricted by a tougher financial restriction.
Later, John Adams, in his book, Defence of the U.S. Constitution, says of the populace that it had, ‘as blind an instinct as those worms that die while weaving magnificent habits for being of a superior order’[2] — hardly a democratic sentiment. James Madison, (the chief writer of the constitution), in the Constitutional Conventions saw the role of the Senate, ‘to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.’[3] Alexander Hamilton argued for lifetime terms for both the president and the Senate and warned that if government was in ‘the hands of the many, they will tyrannize over the few’. And that, ‘nothing but a permanent body [a lifetime senate] can check the imprudence of democracy.’[4]
One should also not forget that even in our own times, Western democracy has faced many challenges and reversals. After all, this century has seen the rise of absolutist and totalitarian ideologies such as Communism, Nazism and Fascism. Spain was ruled by a fascist dictator, General Franco, until 1975, and communism was partially dismantled only a decade ago (many states in Central Asia and indeed in Russia, Yugoslavia until this week and some other Eastern European countries are still ruled by former communist party members). The dreadful ethnic cleansing in Bosnia a few years ago and in Kosovo last year further demonstrate that even in Europe, democracy is still very fragile and can easily be reversed. Therefore, the belief that there has been a long and inherent concept of democracy in the West as opposed to “Eastern despotism” does not stand scrutiny.
Nevertheless, it must be admitted that despite all the shortcomings and challenges that democracy has faced in the West, the new concepts of democracy and human rights owe most to the political and intellectual development of the Western world in the last few centuries. The peoples of other cultures, including the Islamic countries, latched on to these concepts and are trying to adapt them to their own circumstances.
It is possible to refine and reinterpret the concepts of democracy and human rights in such a way that would make them more compatible with different cultures, to make them feel more “indigenous” or more “authentic”. Above all, democracy needs to grow from inside different societies, based on the political and historical backgrounds of various nations. It is not something that can be imposed from outside, least of alI, by the use of military force. It also requires time, as different democratic reforms must be tested, adjusted and improved.
Nevertheless, the main tenets of democracy and human rights that stress the rights of the individuals and allow the citizens to elect their leaders and to choose their form of government cannot be interpreted away. Otherwise, the outcome will not be democracy. In many Middle Eastern country, the point that should be stressed strongly in addition to observing the forms and mechanisms of democracy is the issue of human rights and equality of all citizens before the law.
Democracy also requires free exchange of ideas, which necessitates a free press, free assembly and the freedom to form political parties. Religion still plays an important role in most Middle Eastern societies. In order to pave the way for the establishment of democracy, in addition to freedom of religion, there should be a separation of religion and politics.
All this shows that there is still a long way to go before genuine democracy can be established in the Middle East. However, the winds of change are blowing throughout the Middle East, and with a growing educated, young population, there is great home for greater democracy throughout the Middle East.
[1] Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics (Harvard University Press. 1994), pp 131-132.
[2] Richard, pp. 132 and 135.
[3] Richard, p. 139.
[4] Richard, p. 141.
F Jahanpour 