RRD:I am posting this because of Lewis's eminence in the field of Middle-Eastern studies.My posting it should not be taken as a endorsement of everything he says. Professor Lewis criticizes the equating of elections with freedom.He urges the US to abstain from pushing for elections,which he thinks will benefit Islamist parties.Instead,he advises the Egyptian people to focus on reviving the tradition of "consultation",between the leadership & various sectors of society.He believes the prominent role of women in the Tunisia uprising offers hope for the success of that revolt.
He condemns the Muslim Brotherhood.Finally he offers suggestions on how to help the Iranian people against their regime.
(And before you ask,no I haven't copied the whole thing,it's a very long interview.) Bernard Lewis on the Middle-East revolt A mass expression of outrage against injustice
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=209770 ....." In the West, we tend to get excessively concerned with elections, regarding the holding of elections as the purest expression of democracy, as the climax of the process of democratization. Well, the second may be true –the climax of the process. But the process can be a long and difficult one. Consider, for example, that democracy was fairly new in Germany in the inter-war period and Hitler came to power in a free and fair election. We, in the Western world particularly, tend to think of democracy in our own terms –that’s natural and normal –to mean periodic elections in our style. But I think it’s a great mistake to try and think of the Middle East in those terms and that can only lead to disastrous results, as you’ve already seen in various places. They are simply not ready for free and fair elections. One of the most moving experiences of my life was in the year 1950, most of which I spent in Turkey. That was the time when the Turkish government held a f
ree
and genuinely fair election –the election of 1950 –in which that government was defeated, and even more remarkably the government then quietly and decently withdrew from power and handed over power to the victorious opposition. What followed I can only describe as catastrophic. Adnan Menderes, the leader of the party which won the election, which came to power by their success in the election, soon made it perfectly clear that he had no intention whatever of leaving by the same route by which he had come, that he regarded this as a change of regime, and that he had no respect at all for the electoral process. And people in Turkey began to realize this. I remember vividly sitting one day in the faculty lounge at the school of political sciences in Ankara. This would have been after several years of the Menderes regime. We were sitting in the faculty lounge with some of the professors discussing the history of different political institutions and forms. And one of them sudd
enly
said, to everyone’s astonishment, “Well, the father of democracy in Turkey is Adnan Menderes.” The others looked around in bewilderment. They said, “Adnan Menderes, the father of Turkish democracy ? What do you mean ?” Well, said this professor, “he raped the mother of democracy.” It sounds much better in Turkish... This happened again and again and again. You win an election because an election is forced on the country. But it is seen as a one-way street. Most of the countries in the region are not yet ready for elections.".... ...."If there’s a genuinely free election –assuming that such a thing could happen –the religious parties have an immediate advantage. First, they have a network of communication through the preacher and the mosque which no other political tendency can hope to equal. Second, they use familiar language. The language of Western democracy is for the most part newly translated and not intelligible to the great masses. In genuinely fair and free elections, [the Muslim parties] are very likely to win and I think that would be a disaster. A much better course would be a gradual development of democracy, not through general elections, but rather through local self -governing institutions. For that, there is a real tradition in the region. If you look at the history of the Middle East in the Islamic period, and if you look at their own political literature, it is totally against authoritarian or absolutist rule. The word they always insist on is consultation. This is not just a matter
of theory. There’s a remarkable passage, for example, in the report of a French ambassador to the sultan of Turkey a few years before the French Revolution. The French ambassador was instructed by his government to press the Turkish government in certain negotiations and was making very slow progress. Paris said angrily, “Why don’t you do something ?” The ambassador replied that “you must understand that here things are not as they are in France, where the king is sole master and does as he pleases. Here, the sultan has to consult with the holders of high office. He has to consult with the retired former holders of high office. He has to consult with the merchants, the craft guilds and all sorts of other groups.” This is absolutely true. It’s an extraordinarily revealing and informative passage and the point comes up again and again through the 19th and 20th centuries. You have this traditional system of consultation with groups which are not democratic as we us
e that
word in the Western world, but which have a source of authority other than the state –authority which derives from within the group, whether it be the landed gentry or the civil service, or the scribes or whatever. That’s very important. And that form of consultation could be a much better basis for the development of free and civilized government. ".... RRD:Asked what the US should do: ..." I’d rather take it from the other side and say what signals you should not be sending. And that is not pressing for elections. This idea that a general election, Western-style, is a solution to all these problems, seems to me a dangerous fallacy which can only lead to disaster. I think we should let them do it their way by consultative groups. There are various kinds. There are all sorts of possibilities. It’s happening now in Iraq, for example."....
....." There is a great deal of talk nowadays about consultation. That is very much part of the tradition. The sort of authoritarian, even dictatorial regimes, that rule most of the countries in the modern Islamic Middle East, are a modern creation. They are a result of modernization. The pre -modern regimes were much more open, much more tolerant. You can see this from a number of contemporary descriptions. And the memory of that is still living. It was a British naval officer called Slade who put it very well. He was comparing the old order with the new order, created by modernization. He said that “in the old order, the nobility lived on their estates. In the new order, the state is the estate of the new nobility.” I think that puts it admirably. ".... RRD:On the concepts of Freedom & Justice:
...." In the Western world, we talk all the time about freedom. In the Islamic world, freedom is not a political term. It’s a legal term: Freedom as opposed to slavery. This was a society in which slavery was an accepted institution existing all over the Muslim world. You were free if you were not a slave. It was entirely a legal and social term, with no political connotation whatsoever. You can see in the ongoing debate in Arabic and other languages the puzzlement with which the use of the term freedom was first perceived. They just didn’t understand it. I mean, what does this have to do with politics or government ? Eventually, they got the message. But it’s still alien to them. In Muslim terms, the aim of good government is justice. The major contrast is not between freedom and tyranny, between freedom and servitude, but between justice and oppression. Or if you like, between justice and injustice. If one follows that particular discourse in the Arab and more general
ly the
Muslim world, it would be more illuminating."...
...." Corruption and oppression are corruption and oppression by whichever system you define them. There’s not much difference between their definition of corruption and our definition of corruption. "....
On Women in the Middle-East & Tunisia:
...." There’s one other group of people that I think one should bear in mind when considering the future of the Middle East, and that is women. The case has been made, and I think there is some force in it, that the main reason for the relative backwardness of the Islamic world compared to the West is the treatment of women. As far as I know, it was first made by a Turkish writer called Namik Kemal in about 1880. At that time an agonizing debate had been going on for more than a century: What went wrong? Why did we fall behind the West ? He said, “The answer is very clear. We fell behind the West because of the way we treat our women. By the way we treat our women we deprive ourselves of the talents and services of half the population. And we submit the early education of the other half to ignorant and downtrodden mothers.” It goes further than that. A child who grows up in a traditional Muslim household is accustomed to authoritarian, autocratic rule from the start. I
think
the position of women is of crucial importance. That is why I am looking with great interest at Tunisia. Tunisia is the one Arab country that has really done something about women. In Tunisia there is compulsory education for girls, from primary school, right through. In Tunisia, women are to be found in the professions. There are doctors, lawyers, journalists, politicians and so on. Women play a significant part in public life in Tunisia. I think that is going to have an enormous impact. It’s already having this in Tunisia and you can see that in various ways. But this will certainly spread to other parts of the world. Elsewhere, the question of women and the role of the women is of crucial importance for the future of the Muslim world in general.".... RRD:On the Muslim Brotherhood:
..." To say that they’re secular would show an astonishing ignorance of the English lexicon. I don’t think [the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt] is in any sense benign. I think it is a very dangerous, radical Islamic movement. If they obtain power, the consequences would be disastrous for Egypt. I’m an historian. My business is the past, not the future. But I can imagine a situation in which the Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations of the same kind obtain control of much of the Arab world. It’s not impossible. I wouldn’t say it’s likely, but it’s not unlikely. And if that happens, they would gradually sink back into medieval squalor. Remember that according to their own statistics, the total exports of the entire Arab world other than fossil fuels amount to less than those of Finland, one small European country. Sooner or later the oil age will come to an end. Oil will be either exhausted or superseded as a source of energy and then they have virtually nothing
. In
that case it’s easy to imagine a situation in which Africa north of the Sahara becomes not unlike Africa south of the Sahara."...
...." I don’t know how one could get the impression that the Muslim Brotherhood is relatively benign unless you mean relatively as compared with the Nazi party."... RRD:On Protesters in Syria & The Green Movement: ..."As far as one can judge, these movements of opposition are very strong, even in Iran for example. Now, as you say, the Iranian regime is very repressive. Nevertheless, there are ways in which people can communicate, notably by telephone, e-mail and the rest, and the messages coming out of Iran are unequivocal. It makes it clear that the regime is extremely unpopular. There are two oppositions, opposition to the regime, and opposition within the regime. I think that with even a little help from outside it would be possible to do something. As the saying goes, “You can’t beat something with nothing.” .... ..."One method is by political warfare, by having some sort of propaganda campaign against the regime. This would not be difficult. There’s a vast Iranian population now in the Western world, particularly in the United States, who I’m sure would be willing to help in this, and thanks to modern communications, it would not be too difficult to get the message across. The messages coming out of Iran make this very clear. You must have heard when the American forces went into Iraq, lots of Iranians wrote e-mails or telephoned, saying, “You should have tackled your problems in alphabetical order.”....
He condemns the Muslim Brotherhood.Finally he offers suggestions on how to help the Iranian people against their regime.
(And before you ask,no I haven't copied the whole thing,it's a very long interview.) Bernard Lewis on the Middle-East revolt A mass expression of outrage against injustice
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=209770 ....." In the West, we tend to get excessively concerned with elections, regarding the holding of elections as the purest expression of democracy, as the climax of the process of democratization. Well, the second may be true –the climax of the process. But the process can be a long and difficult one. Consider, for example, that democracy was fairly new in Germany in the inter-war period and Hitler came to power in a free and fair election. We, in the Western world particularly, tend to think of democracy in our own terms –that’s natural and normal –to mean periodic elections in our style. But I think it’s a great mistake to try and think of the Middle East in those terms and that can only lead to disastrous results, as you’ve already seen in various places. They are simply not ready for free and fair elections. One of the most moving experiences of my life was in the year 1950, most of which I spent in Turkey. That was the time when the Turkish government held a f
ree
and genuinely fair election –the election of 1950 –in which that government was defeated, and even more remarkably the government then quietly and decently withdrew from power and handed over power to the victorious opposition. What followed I can only describe as catastrophic. Adnan Menderes, the leader of the party which won the election, which came to power by their success in the election, soon made it perfectly clear that he had no intention whatever of leaving by the same route by which he had come, that he regarded this as a change of regime, and that he had no respect at all for the electoral process. And people in Turkey began to realize this. I remember vividly sitting one day in the faculty lounge at the school of political sciences in Ankara. This would have been after several years of the Menderes regime. We were sitting in the faculty lounge with some of the professors discussing the history of different political institutions and forms. And one of them sudd
enly
said, to everyone’s astonishment, “Well, the father of democracy in Turkey is Adnan Menderes.” The others looked around in bewilderment. They said, “Adnan Menderes, the father of Turkish democracy ? What do you mean ?” Well, said this professor, “he raped the mother of democracy.” It sounds much better in Turkish... This happened again and again and again. You win an election because an election is forced on the country. But it is seen as a one-way street. Most of the countries in the region are not yet ready for elections.".... ...."If there’s a genuinely free election –assuming that such a thing could happen –the religious parties have an immediate advantage. First, they have a network of communication through the preacher and the mosque which no other political tendency can hope to equal. Second, they use familiar language. The language of Western democracy is for the most part newly translated and not intelligible to the great masses. In genuinely fair and free elections, [the Muslim parties] are very likely to win and I think that would be a disaster. A much better course would be a gradual development of democracy, not through general elections, but rather through local self -governing institutions. For that, there is a real tradition in the region. If you look at the history of the Middle East in the Islamic period, and if you look at their own political literature, it is totally against authoritarian or absolutist rule. The word they always insist on is consultation. This is not just a matter
of theory. There’s a remarkable passage, for example, in the report of a French ambassador to the sultan of Turkey a few years before the French Revolution. The French ambassador was instructed by his government to press the Turkish government in certain negotiations and was making very slow progress. Paris said angrily, “Why don’t you do something ?” The ambassador replied that “you must understand that here things are not as they are in France, where the king is sole master and does as he pleases. Here, the sultan has to consult with the holders of high office. He has to consult with the retired former holders of high office. He has to consult with the merchants, the craft guilds and all sorts of other groups.” This is absolutely true. It’s an extraordinarily revealing and informative passage and the point comes up again and again through the 19th and 20th centuries. You have this traditional system of consultation with groups which are not democratic as we us
e that
word in the Western world, but which have a source of authority other than the state –authority which derives from within the group, whether it be the landed gentry or the civil service, or the scribes or whatever. That’s very important. And that form of consultation could be a much better basis for the development of free and civilized government. ".... RRD:Asked what the US should do: ..." I’d rather take it from the other side and say what signals you should not be sending. And that is not pressing for elections. This idea that a general election, Western-style, is a solution to all these problems, seems to me a dangerous fallacy which can only lead to disaster. I think we should let them do it their way by consultative groups. There are various kinds. There are all sorts of possibilities. It’s happening now in Iraq, for example."....
....." There is a great deal of talk nowadays about consultation. That is very much part of the tradition. The sort of authoritarian, even dictatorial regimes, that rule most of the countries in the modern Islamic Middle East, are a modern creation. They are a result of modernization. The pre -modern regimes were much more open, much more tolerant. You can see this from a number of contemporary descriptions. And the memory of that is still living. It was a British naval officer called Slade who put it very well. He was comparing the old order with the new order, created by modernization. He said that “in the old order, the nobility lived on their estates. In the new order, the state is the estate of the new nobility.” I think that puts it admirably. ".... RRD:On the concepts of Freedom & Justice:
...." In the Western world, we talk all the time about freedom. In the Islamic world, freedom is not a political term. It’s a legal term: Freedom as opposed to slavery. This was a society in which slavery was an accepted institution existing all over the Muslim world. You were free if you were not a slave. It was entirely a legal and social term, with no political connotation whatsoever. You can see in the ongoing debate in Arabic and other languages the puzzlement with which the use of the term freedom was first perceived. They just didn’t understand it. I mean, what does this have to do with politics or government ? Eventually, they got the message. But it’s still alien to them. In Muslim terms, the aim of good government is justice. The major contrast is not between freedom and tyranny, between freedom and servitude, but between justice and oppression. Or if you like, between justice and injustice. If one follows that particular discourse in the Arab and more general
ly the
Muslim world, it would be more illuminating."...
...." Corruption and oppression are corruption and oppression by whichever system you define them. There’s not much difference between their definition of corruption and our definition of corruption. "....
On Women in the Middle-East & Tunisia:
...." There’s one other group of people that I think one should bear in mind when considering the future of the Middle East, and that is women. The case has been made, and I think there is some force in it, that the main reason for the relative backwardness of the Islamic world compared to the West is the treatment of women. As far as I know, it was first made by a Turkish writer called Namik Kemal in about 1880. At that time an agonizing debate had been going on for more than a century: What went wrong? Why did we fall behind the West ? He said, “The answer is very clear. We fell behind the West because of the way we treat our women. By the way we treat our women we deprive ourselves of the talents and services of half the population. And we submit the early education of the other half to ignorant and downtrodden mothers.” It goes further than that. A child who grows up in a traditional Muslim household is accustomed to authoritarian, autocratic rule from the start. I
think
the position of women is of crucial importance. That is why I am looking with great interest at Tunisia. Tunisia is the one Arab country that has really done something about women. In Tunisia there is compulsory education for girls, from primary school, right through. In Tunisia, women are to be found in the professions. There are doctors, lawyers, journalists, politicians and so on. Women play a significant part in public life in Tunisia. I think that is going to have an enormous impact. It’s already having this in Tunisia and you can see that in various ways. But this will certainly spread to other parts of the world. Elsewhere, the question of women and the role of the women is of crucial importance for the future of the Muslim world in general.".... RRD:On the Muslim Brotherhood:
..." To say that they’re secular would show an astonishing ignorance of the English lexicon. I don’t think [the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt] is in any sense benign. I think it is a very dangerous, radical Islamic movement. If they obtain power, the consequences would be disastrous for Egypt. I’m an historian. My business is the past, not the future. But I can imagine a situation in which the Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations of the same kind obtain control of much of the Arab world. It’s not impossible. I wouldn’t say it’s likely, but it’s not unlikely. And if that happens, they would gradually sink back into medieval squalor. Remember that according to their own statistics, the total exports of the entire Arab world other than fossil fuels amount to less than those of Finland, one small European country. Sooner or later the oil age will come to an end. Oil will be either exhausted or superseded as a source of energy and then they have virtually nothing
. In
that case it’s easy to imagine a situation in which Africa north of the Sahara becomes not unlike Africa south of the Sahara."...
...." I don’t know how one could get the impression that the Muslim Brotherhood is relatively benign unless you mean relatively as compared with the Nazi party."... RRD:On Protesters in Syria & The Green Movement: ..."As far as one can judge, these movements of opposition are very strong, even in Iran for example. Now, as you say, the Iranian regime is very repressive. Nevertheless, there are ways in which people can communicate, notably by telephone, e-mail and the rest, and the messages coming out of Iran are unequivocal. It makes it clear that the regime is extremely unpopular. There are two oppositions, opposition to the regime, and opposition within the regime. I think that with even a little help from outside it would be possible to do something. As the saying goes, “You can’t beat something with nothing.” .... ..."One method is by political warfare, by having some sort of propaganda campaign against the regime. This would not be difficult. There’s a vast Iranian population now in the Western world, particularly in the United States, who I’m sure would be willing to help in this, and thanks to modern communications, it would not be too difficult to get the message across. The messages coming out of Iran make this very clear. You must have heard when the American forces went into Iraq, lots of Iranians wrote e-mails or telephoned, saying, “You should have tackled your problems in alphabetical order.”....
No comments:
Post a Comment