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Fitzgerald: Islam, democracy, and the Lords of Misrule

Sep 1, 2009 5:05 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

“Chechen rebels have today called for prominent separatist leader Akhmed Zakayev to be killed, saying he has abandoned Islam.” – from this news article

Zakeyev is to be killed not because he is himself a bully-boy and murderer (he is both of those things), but because — nota bene — he has “fallen away from Islam.” That is the only category that makes sense for Muslims. Mere corruption or murder of opponents is not enough. The Ruler is to be obeyed, unless his behavior can be characterized as not that of a Muslim. There is no appeal to universal principles of morality. It is not that this family has appropriated much of the nation’s wealth, or that ruler has appointed all of his cousins to high positions, or that the sons of that other ruler go around raping girls with impunity.

Had Zakeyev been someone else, someone just as vicious and murderous as he is, but merely an indigenous lord of Muslim misrule, instead of, as Zakeyev is, a local enforcer for the Russians, then only the usual handful of the intellectually and morally advanced would have been against him. The rest would have been subservient to the ruler’s authority. Despotism comes naturally to Muslim polities.
Look at the Muslim-dominated countries. There are 57 members of the O.I.C. How many of those dominated by Muslims are at all “democratic”? How many hold elections, but the elections are farcical? How many Arab Muslim countries are ruled by families who seize much of the nation’s wealth — or demurely, by now, merely have it appropriated — such as the Al-Maktoum of Dubai, the Al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi, the Al-Thani of Qatar, the Al-Sabah of Kuwait, and so on?
Then there are the monarchs — the kinglet of Jordan, for example, who does not have oil and gas but have a long tradition of extracting foreign aid. It was the C.I.A., or rather American taxpayers, who picked up the bills for the high-end call girls who arrived at the assorted suites of that “plucky little king” Hussein of Jordan, every Western columnist’s favorite Arab leade). How long has Mubarak with his Family-and-Friends plan been ruling in Egypt, and how “democratic” are any of his farcical elections? In Tunisia, where Ben Ali continues, thank god, to ruthlessly round up those who oppose the secularist tendencies of his regime, which merely continues what Habib Bourguiba and the Destour Party started, what would happen if the secret police stopped their work? In the Sherifian monarchy (the king being a descendant of Muhammad, which helps to protect him from attack) of Morocco, where is the democracy?

Give the Muslim world a close look, and you will find hints of democracy only in a few places. There is little or nothing of the rule of law, the equal treatment of all minorities, the careful guarantees of individual rights, the legal and political institutions that make all of this possible, and the widespread shared understanding of why all this is necessary, why merely elections and head-counting do not constitute the kind of “democracy” we think the word should signify. In Lebanon, because of a large and powerful Christian presence (that is, the Maronites, as well as Melkites and Orthodox), there has been a kind of “democracy” in the sense that elections are held, and the results mean something. But the agreement to assign certain posts to a Christian, a Sunni, a Shi’a, a Druse, and the continued reliance on the census of 1934 (thank god, for in those days the Christians constituted a much greater percentage of the population) show how imperfect Lebanese “democracy” is.

But mostly, where there are not hereditary rulers — monarchs and princes and sultans — there are “republics.” The word “republic” means, in the Arab and Muslim context, not a “republic” in the Western sense, but merely a regime that is based on something other than hereditary rule by a dynasty. How many of those “republics” are akin to Western democracies? The closest one is Turkey. And that is because Turkey is a country where, ever since the 1920s, an effort — Kemalism — has been made to put in place laws that will systematically constrain the political and social power of Islam, and to create the conditions in which genuinely secular people (about one-fourth of the Turkish population) can arise. The tragedy is that those beneficiaries of Kemalism, now threatened by the sinister Erdogan and his associates, allowed the army, through its power to stage coups, to be the guarantor, through force, of Kemalism. Instead, the Kemalist effort ought to have continued, with a relentlessness and a ruthlessness that would match or overmatch the relentlessness and ruthlessness displayed by Erbakan, Erdogan, and all the others, including that most dangerous man, Fethulah Gulen.

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