Last week, Ted Theodorsen in his commentary on Democracy, Islam and Sharia; asserted that “Only… if you create a secular nation can democracy flourish.”
Several observations and some disagreements:
The Muslim masses have a powerful and instinctive religious impulse, driven by their acceptance of Islam and their oneness with Allah.
As such, they are not bribed by the secular, which historically has always been viscerally hostile to the religious and the spiritual.
Democracy, an offspring of the French Enlightenment, is a western constructed institution of very recent origin, unlike monarchy.
The notion that the Muslim world cannot advance without a democratic ethos sends the message that we are cultural chauvinists.
The lodestone for Islam has always been and always will be Mecca and Medina. Yet as one separates to say, Spanish Morocco in the west and Indonesia or Malaysia in the east, the pull of Islam eases perceptively.
Perhaps most importantly, the Persian Gulf nations are now evolving dramatically.
Examples include Hamid bin Isa al-Kalifa, Emir of Bahrain (20 miles from Saudi Arabia) who in 1972 decreed English to be the language of the marketplace, allowing Manama to supplant Beirut as the banking center of the Middle East. Sultan Qaboos advanced similar dramatic reforms in Oman where women hold title to property in their own name, marry and work freely plus drive cars in Muscat. Lord have mercy! Anyone who wants a fair picture of Persian Gulf culture, should key in Abu Dhabi and/or Dubai, both in the Emirates, on their computer.
While it is true that Mustapha Ataturk, a ‘Young Turk’ of the Great War era instituted transformational change in Turkey, Islam was never his target.
Rather, he sought to obliterate the oppressive and retrograde legacy of absolutism that the Ottoman Caliphate had imposed on the Turkish people for hundreds of years, a critical distinction.
Whether his legacy persists however, remains problematic as there has been significant regression over the past generation.
The catalyst for upheaval in the Muslim world is neither a lack of democracy nor the rise of religious zealotry. Rather it’s a lack of economic opportunity due largely to their singular focus on oil and gas to the detriment of diversity and innovation.
Analogous to our South, cotton growing was land, manpower and water intensive; all scarce and expensive resources. This crowded out manufacturing, concentrating power and wealth among the plantation class and retarded development of the South to the detriment of the nation.
During my 18 years in the Middle East, I like to believe that I learned a thing or two; most critically, that Kipling’s remark about the dichotomy between East and West was on the mark.
Tom Coffey
Herricks
