Faith and Power by Lewis Bernard;

Author:Lewis, Bernard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2010-06-24T04:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

Democracy and Religion in the Middle East

FOR MOST OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, TWO IDEAS dominated political debate in the Middle East: nationalism and socialism. Sometimes the one, sometimes the other, and sometimes the two in the devastating combination of national socialism exercised enormous attraction. Both were of European origin; both from time to time enjoyed the active support of European powers. Both were adapted in various ways and with varying success to Middle Eastern conditions and needs. They gained at times passionate support and helped to accomplish significant major changes.

By the end of the century, both had lost most of their appeal. Of the two, socialism is the more seriously discredited—on the one hand, by the collapse of its superpower patron, the Soviet Union; on the other, perhaps more cogently, by the failure of Middle Eastern and North African regimes professing one or another kind of socialism to lead their people into the promised land. Instead of freedom and prosperity, they delivered tyranny and poverty, in increasingly obvious contrast with the democratic world.

Nationalism was not discredited but rather superseded by the attainment of its main objective and the consequences that followed that attainment. With the advent of full national independence, it became increasingly clear that freedom and independence were different things. In some definitions of independence, they even appeared to be incompatible.

Nationalist aims have been achieved; socialist hopes have been abandoned. But the two basic problems they were designed to remedy—deprivation and subjugation—remain and are, if anything, becoming worse. The population explosion has made the poor poorer and more numerous; the communications revolution has made them far more aware of their poverty. The departure of imperial garrisons and proconsuls has removed the most plausible excuse for the powerlessness and economic backwardness of the Muslim Middle East as contrasted, not only with the West but also with the rising powers of Asia and the near challenge of Israel. The problems remain and are becoming more serious and more visible. The search for solutions is still in progress.

When General Bonaparte invaded and occupied Egypt in 1798—an event that, by the consensus of historians, inaugurated the modern history of the Middle East—there were only two independent powers in the region, Turkey and Iran. During the era of imperialist rivalries and domination, both managed, though often with considerable difficulty, to preserve their sovereign independence. The breakup of the empires—British, French, Italian, and, most recently, Russian—made possible the emergence of a whole series of new independent states. Some of these, like Egypt and Morocco, are sustained by a sense of distinctive national identity going back centuries or even, for Egypt, millennia. But most are new constructs of uncertain and shifting identity. On the one hand, these states were long threatened by movements aiming at merging them into larger, vaguer identities, like pan-Arabism or pan-Turkism. More recently, they have been threatened from below, by regional, sectarian, ethnic, and tribal loyalties that endanger the very existence of the sovereign state. The Lebanese civil wars demonstrated where this can lead.

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