Author: Barry Rubin
Publication:
Date: August 5, 2008
A nineteen-year-old man is to be beheaded
for a bad joke interpreted as blasphemy. A father is accused of killing his
son because he converted to another religion. They are not Muslims but Christians;
the place is France in the mid-1700s.
There was a time when Europe often behaved
in ways parallel to that of Muslim-majority countries today. Yet by the 1700s
this was changing. In the former case, the king and even Catholic bishops
failed to save the unfortunate Chevalier de la Barre but the outcry led to
the end of such actions. In the latter, the immediate reaction was to sentence
the father, Monsieur Calas, to death for murder, soon changed--by outraged
public opinion--to freeing him as victim of an unjust frame-up merely because
he was a Protestant.
So it's true there are parallels between Western
and Middle Eastern societies. But even leaving aside quite important doctrinal
religious issues the difference is that things far in the past in Western
ones still exist in Muslim-majority counterparts. Crusades ended eight centuries
ago; Jihad continues.
There are other critical differences as well.
One is that progressive opinion, intellectuals, governments, even much of
the Christian churches themselves, fought for progress in the West. They didn't
say, "These are our sacred practices, our lifestyle and thus must remain
forever unchanged." They didn't let fear of being labeled "Christianophobic"
paralyze them.
Another is that four centuries of rethinking,
struggle, and debate were needed to create contemporary Western democratic
society. Such processes have, at best, barely begun in the contemporary Middle
East.
It's extraordinary that much analysis of the
region--possibly the most important intellectual endeavor of our times--is
conducted in an ad lib fashion based on the latest newspaper interview, underlain
with wishful thinking. If we're going to be serious about this task serious
historical perspective is needed. Most should be based on the region's own
distinctive past and world view. But since people insist on making trans-regional
analogies here's the way to do it.
Consider the following statement: "The
world is not ruled by an intelligent being." Instead, religion has created
a deity who is "monster of unreason, injustice, malice, and atrocity."
Who said this, someone last week in the West? No, it was the French writer
Jean Meslier in 1723. That statement, too hot to publish at the time, was
a few decades later in the mainstream of French discourse. Oh, by the way,
Meslier was a lifelong Catholic priest.
The basis of democracy began in 1215 with
the Magna Carta in England. The battle to have a legitimately accepted division
between religion and state was waged and largely won in the Middle Ages. A
basis was laid for secular-dominated society.
True, in the 1500s underground Catholic priests
in England were tortured and executed while Protestants in France suffered
even worse. Yet at the same time, English universities were teaching the Classical
tradition which, in Italy, was the basis of representational art. The plays
of Shakespeare and the works of others depended on this freedom, background,
and example. A basis was laid for a pragmatic, empiricist, utilitarian culture
that stood on the scientific method.
That was called the Renaissance, which means
re-birth. For the West, the great civilization of Classical times was being
rebuilt. But Greece and Rome were not part of the Arab-Islamic tradition.
Representational art is viewed with suspicion. The time before the coming
of Islam is rejected with horror.
To this day, secularism is almost a hanging
offense in the Middle East and democracy, as it is understood in the West,
is deemed inappropriate. Much of Europe's cultural production of Europe in
the sixteenth through eighteenth century could not be produced and widely
accepted in the Arabic-speaking world today.
Of course, these things do appear, but usually
as imports from the West, which raises suspicions and gives ruling forces--clerical
and state--a strong incentive to demonize the West to limit the appeal of
subversive ideas.
The great historian of France, Alfred Cobban,
wrote that the new secular ideology triumphed there between 1748 and 1770,
after already flourishing in Britain and the Netherlands. Even in the Catholic
Church "the persecuting spirit was dying down." The English, Dutch,
American, and French revolutions were not triumphs of traditionalism, as in
Iran, but of greater democracy. Many Westerners continued (as they do today)
to be religious, but of a more open and tolerant variety.
This struggle between the old and new societies
characterized much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, yet the trend
was steady. Perhaps fascism (arguably Communism) and World War Two were, respectively,
the final reactionary movements and last struggle. Yet victory required 500
years of rethinking and education.
There's no such history in the Middle East
and several additional problems block change toward moderation and democracy
here. Whatever one thinks of specific Islamic doctrine as generally interpreted
the big problem is that it remains so powerful and hegemonic. Arab nationalism
is anti-democratic, repressive, and statist. Islamists seek a somewhat revised
version of the eighth century, albeit with rockets and mass communication.
It is also worse because Middle East regimes
and revolutionaries know Western history. They are aware of the fact that
while pious Western philosophers and scientists sincerely believed open inquiry
and democracy didn't threaten traditional religion and the status quo they
were wrong. Openness led to revolution and to modern secular-dominated society,
a West with all the ills decried by those in religious, ideological and political
power in the Middle East. They know what happened to Soviet bloc dictatorships
that experimented with more freedom, too. And they know that accepting Western
ideas makes people want to change their own societies.
On top of their knowledge, they have weapons,
technology, new means of organization and communication to block change through
persuasion and threat. This point applies as much to Iran's Islamist rulers
as to Syria's pretend-pious ones or Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi monarchs.
Finally, it is worse because there's a powerful,
growing movement--radical Islamism--posin an alternative to modernism. The
question is not merely of tiny, marginalized al-Qaida but also the governments
of Iran, Syria, and Sudan; the Saudi regime; powerful mainstream societal
influences, Hamas and Hizballah; the Muslim Brotherhoods, and many others.
In comparison, while there are courageous
individual liberals, there's no real liberal party anywhere in the Middle
East, no liberal-controlled media or liberal proselytizing university. In
Egypt the liberal organization has been taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood.
So while the great majority of people want
a good life for themselves and their children, breathe air, drink water, and
bleed when they are pricked--as they did in Ice Age caves, ancient Rome, Medieval
France, imperial China, Inca Peru, or the central deserts of Australia that
does not mean everyone thinks the same or that all societies and governments
are basically equivalent. Anyone who doesn't understand history is doomed
to be battered by it.
- Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research
in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review
of International Affairs Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader
(seventh edition), with Walter Laqueur (Viking-Penguin); the paperback edition
of The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan); A Chronological History of
Terrorism, with Judy Colp Rubin, (Sharpe); and The Long War for Freedom: The
Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley). Prof. Rubin's columns
can be read online.