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Al-Arabiya Chief: No Evidence Islam is Compatible w/Democracy
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On November 14, 2014 @ 6:18 pm In The Point | 9 Comments
No Western writer could have gotten away with this. But Politico surprisingly did publish this from the D.C. bureau chief of Saudi Arabia’s Al-Arabiya network; think a less radical and much less watched Al Jazeera.
For most Islamists, democracy means only majoritarian rule, and the rule of sharia law, which codifies gender inequality and discrimination against non-Muslims.
And let’s face the grim truth: There is no evidence whatever that Islam in its various political forms is compatible with modern democracy. From Afghanistan under the Taliban to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and from Iran to Sudan, there is no Islamist entity that can be said to be democratic, just or a practitioner of good governance.
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Like the Islamists, the Arab nationalists—particularly the Baathists—were also fixated on a “renaissance” of past Arab greatness, which had once flourished in the famed cities of Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo and Córdoba in Al-Andalus, now Spain. These nationalists believed that Arab language and culture (and to a lesser extent Islam) were enough to unite disparate entities with different levels of social, political and cultural development. They were in denial that they lived in a far more diverse world. Those minorities that resisted the primacy of Arab identity were discriminated against, denied citizenship and basic rights, and in the case of the Kurds in Iraq were subjected to massive repression and killings of genocidal proportion. Under the guise of Arab nationalism the modern Arab despot (Saddam, Qaddafi, the Assads) emerged.
Hisham writes off both Arab nationalists and Islamists. He does avoid talking about Saudi Arabia, for obvious reasons. But it’s not like there’s any civilization there. Just a tribal power base that is destroying what’s left of Arab civilization; something that he no doubt knows, but can’t say.
There’s some significance to the admission that Sharia law discriminates against women and non-Muslims, though it’s a point that is nearly impossible to argue with, though liberals somehow do.
My generation of Arabs was told by both the Arab nationalists and the Islamists that we should man the proverbial ramparts to defend the “Arab World” against the numerous barbarians (imperialists, Zionists, Soviets) massing at the gates. Little did we know that the barbarians were already inside the gates, that they spoke our language and were already very well entrenched in the city.
More aptly, and he partly admits it, the Arab Nationalists and the Islamists were the barbarians. Barbarism was the essential hope of the Arab World in the 20th century. How else does one example the veneration of petty tyrants and blind madmen spouting Koran verses. The highlights of Arab civilization in the last century that he remembers took place under European colonialism or its shadow. But that worked only when an elite could have access while the rabble were shut out.
It’s precisely democracy or rather democratization that helped lead to the rise of tyrants and Islamists to satisfy the popular will. It also made the conditions of civilization impossible since those conditions conflicted with the popular will.
It was easier to create enemies than to build a civilization, easier to nurture a sense of persecution than to produce anything worthwhile. The barbarians weren’t just inside the city, they were the city.
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