Last time out I expressed my concern that with no judicial institutions to protect the rights of minorities, the flowers of freedom that have bloomed in countries like Egypt and Tunisia during the ‘Arab Spring’ will be trampled by the “tyranny of the majority”.
But I am also concerned that many of us in the western media who have grown up in liberal democracies do not fully appreciate the important role that strong electoral and judicial institutions play in protecting the rights of minorities from such ‘tyranny’.
People in north Africa and the Middle East are genuinely worried about what might happen in their countries if and or when protesters succeed in toppling their authoritarian regimes. However, even though liberal democratic political governance is a rarity in majority Muslim nations (there are exceptions – Indonesia, Mali and Malaysia come to mind) I disagree with those Islamosceptics who argue that Islam is somehow incompatible with the equality principles of liberal democracy.
The arguments I hear most often in America and Europe are that most Muslims either harbour a desire to live in a society based on the Sharia law of Islam, or wish to be governed by a religious political authority al-Qaeda refers to as the ‘grand caliphate’ that will enforce Sharia.
I have no doubt that the pseudo-religious political extremists in al-Qaeda and Hizb ut-Tahrir, as well as many of the less extreme Muslims who support the Muslim Brotherhood, have a desire to be governed according to Islamic law. But I also know there are Jewish extremists who wish their societies were governed by the Halakha laws of the Torah, and Christian extremists who believe Biblical laws should hold sway. In other words, every religion has at least some adherents who believe their holy texts should be taken literally rather than interpreted within the context of the time when they were written.
I argue that the majority of modern Muslims are actually no different than the majority of modern Christians and Jews in that they believe their democratic societies’ civil and criminal laws should be drafted by their elected officials in accord with their national constitutions, not the ancient texts of their respective religious faiths. In fact, if our modern laws were actually based on these ancient texts, then those of us who curse God or any children who curse their parents would be condemned to death for these criminal ‘offences’.
This is why, in the wake of the Arab Spring upheavals, I believe most middle class Muslims in these nations share my concerns about the ethnic, political and societal instability that will result from attempting to establish liberal democracies in nations that do not have the institutional foundations or experience needed for effective democratic governance.
Middle class, moderate Muslims are afraid because they know Islamist groups will probably win the first democratic elections since they are better organised than the secular young activists who led and promoted the Arab Spring protests. But despite assurances from Islamist groups that they will draft constitutions that promote an open-minded and peaceful version of Islam that does not discriminate against ethnic and religious minority groups, many Muslims seriously doubt this.
Middle class Muslims are afraid because they have seen the sectarian violence that engulfed Iraq after Saddam Hussein was toppled, and the burning of Coptic churches after Mubarak was driven from power in Egypt by Salafists who espouse the intolerant Wahhabist version of Islam.
I hope I’m wrong, but based on what has happened thus far, I simply don’t believe that the kind of democracies that will emerge in the Arab world in the wake of the Arab Spring will bear much resemblance to the liberal democracy that the protesters were hoping for.
Charles Laffiteau is a US Republican from Dallas, Texas who is pursuing a PhD in International Relations and lectures on Contemporary US Business & Society at DCU
