Muslim North Africa

May 25, 2009

[First published July 28, 2005] Not all Muslims are terrorists. Dictators do not rule not all Muslims in these nations. Some live in democracies, although one wouldn’t know it from the commentators who exclaim that the Muslim religion is inconsistent with democracy. Although this often appears a sally against the Bush foreign policy in the Middle East, I think many of them believe it. It is helpful, therefore, to look at the status of Muslim nations in what is considered the hard-core, anti-democratic region, of North Africa, including the Horn of Africa. The map below shows the region to which I’m referring.

Now, lets look at these nations in detail. Below are two statistical tables on them, with their freedom status added. All those labeled free are liberal democracies, and those partly free with an asterisk are electoral democracies. As you can see, there are four liberal democracies out of 25 Muslim nations, and eight democracies when the electoral democracies are counted. This is far below the global proportion 44 percent liberal democracies and of 61 percent democratic.

So, for Africa it is clear that the Muslim religious culture appears as a hindrance to democracy. But, this is misleading. For the implication is that Muslims then oppose democracy, which is not true. I went into this on my Freedomist Blog (link here). Muslims place a higher value on democracy than do some people of the democracies. See the chart below

As I concluded my Freedomist Blog, what most clearly distinguishes democracy from nondemocracies is that in nondemocracies people live in fear. We see this in the Arab and North African Muslim countries. Therefore, if the democratization the Muslims value is to come, it must come from pressure from the outside. In this, the Forward Strategy of Freedom of President Bush is well aligned with our understanding of Muslim nations, and it is working.

Link of Note

“Talk By Radwan Masmoudi: “Islam & Democracy:  Between The Past, The Present & The Future”

Dr. Radwan Masmoudi is the Executive Director of Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy. He says:

The old methods of oppression are simply outdated.  More than 50% of the population of Muslim countries is under 30 years old.  They did not witness colonization, and do not care about the independence struggle.  They are highly educated, they speak several languages, and they watch CNN and al-Jazeera.  Many of them even have access to the internet.  They see how other people live, in terms of prosperity and freedom, and they want the same.  They watch other peoples vote and elect their new leaders, while they are stuck with the same rulers for what seems like eternity.  The new generation is fed up with the status quo.  Change is inevitable.  The only question that remains is: What kind of change?

Our answers should be direct and unambiguous: democratize and we will help you in the process and afterwards.
Universal Archive

Muslim Arabs Favor Democracy

May 2, 2009

click me^–>

On the right is my graphite stick painting, I call “Hero”, of one of the most memorable photos from the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, China. The blog below is a repost of my July 24, 2005, post on my non-functioning Freedomist blog.

For those interested in freedom and systematically collected statistics on it, there are a few essential websites to know about. Among them are Freedom House and its rating of countries by their freedom and various reports on democracy; and another is the Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal “Index of Economic Freedom”. Another site, apparently not well known outside of academia, is The World Values Survey at the University of Michigan.

So much of what the media has to say about other countries, their values, and their view of democracy and the United States, is by assumption, unreliable personal experiences, and hearsay. Yet, here is a huge survey that assessed the values of 65 societies over six continents and encompassing 80 percent of the world population. Moreover, they can track the change in values of particular societies over time, since they have done surveys in 1981 (limited to Europe), 1990-191, 1995-1996, and 1999-2001 (all global). Their sample for each nation ran to at least 1,000 people. All their reports and data are available from their website or given links.

One more thing. Their systematic analysis of the values they uncover is systematic and at the forefront of available methodologies. They use correlation, multiple regression, and factor analysis extensively, on which I have written a textbook (see my summary article here, and so I can attest to the validity of their results.

Of course, I will be exploiting their conclusions and data as relevant to freedomism, and for this blog want to focus on the valuation of democracy among Arab Muslim countries. I don’t need to garner quotes for what is obvious in the American media, which is the belief that by culture and religion, Arabs do not think highly of democracy. Or to make this comparative, they think much less highly of democracy than do Western democracies. Wrong. See their studies, Muslims and Democracy” (use the search box in the upper right to search under the author, Fares al-Braizat), and “The Worldviews of Islamic Publics in Global Perspective” (use the search box to search under the author, Ronald Inglehart).

Some tidbits from both studies:

The major differences in values lie along two dimensions (75% of the variance) a traditional vs. secular rational dimension, or religiosity vs. economic development; and a survival values vs. self-expression (e.g., economic security over self-expression).

Religion defines compact cultural zones, but historical experience plays a role just as it did for those nations that were ruled by communism

As low income societies, fourteen Islamic societies tend to emphasize tradition and survival values (e.g., low tolerance of outgroups such as gays and women, and low valuation of freedom of speech and political participation), except for Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran, which tend to be more secular-rational.

The correlations between secular-rational societies across the globe and freedom is.83.

To the statement that, “Democracy may have problems but it’s better than any other form of government,” the people of five Arab countries strongly agreed. See the table below. Note with amazement how this agreement is greater than that for the sample from other regions, such as Western Europe. Agreement for other Muslim nations is a little lower, but still greater than for Latin American and U.S./Canada/Australia/New Zealand..

I trust the validity of this study, and therefore must ask: why is there such a democracy deficit in the world’s 47 Muslim countries, only a fourth of which are at least electoral democracies? In the main, it is the rule by dictators who fear radical Islamicists. Besides their personal gain and their lust for power, these dictators see democratization as a risky gamble. Thus, they use the popular language of democracy to maintain their rule. Given the popularity of democracy among the people, why don’t they rise up and demand democracy. Tradition, religion, but above all the fear of what dictatorship will do to them.

As Natan Sharansky wrote in his important and informative book, The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, what most clearly distinguishes democracies from nondemocracies is that in nondemocracies people live in fear. We see this in the Arab countries. Therefore, if the democratization the Arab people value is to come, it must come from pressure from the outside. In this, President Bush’s “Forward Strategy of Freedom” is well aligned with our understanding of the Middle East, and it is working.

Links to Share

“Islam and Freedom” Dean’s World Blog:

In short, regardless of the percentage of muslims in the population, the trend in most of these nations is toward greater and greater freedom (although Albania sure has staggered a lot). The only nation in this group to have regressed significantly is only 20% muslim, while nations with 35, 60, and even 99% muslim populations have measurably increased in freedom.

“Uganda Misses US Cash Over Freedom”:

ANDA has once again missed out on the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) because of its poor performance in political freedom and civil liberties. The two-year-old MCA is a development initiative that was established in January 2004 when the US Congress provided nearly $1 billion in initial funding that financial year for more than a dozen selected poor countries. President George Bush has requested $3 billion for 2006 for this democracy incentive.

“The North Korea ‘Quagmire'”:

The steady economic decline and the barely adequate humanitarian assistance received from China have brought North Korea into an economic desperation that has caused the governments controlling the nation to rely on income from illegal drug sales, sales of arms and missiles and counterfeiting currency. All of these illicit dealings are highly documented.”

Never Again: Ending War, Democide, & Famine
Through Democratic Freedom.
Downloadable free as pdf

Understanding The Cartoon Riots

January 15, 2009

[First published February 8, 2006] Muslim riots over the Danish media’s cartoons that demeaned Mohammad; wild demonstrations; the burning and trampling of the Danish flag; the destruction of Danish embassies; and huge crowds of madly waving signs and fists. And Muslims are getting killed.

Of course, these outbursts reflect a double standard — Muslims debase other religions, call for the extermination of Jews, and every day publish hate cartoons and articles against other religions and people. It is clear that they have no appreciation of what freedom of speech means.

Correct? It this how we should see this madness? As a clash of civilizations?

No, as common as this view is, it is wrong headed. True, Muslims are largely stuck in distant centuries. Not much imagination is needed to consider what Christians would have done about such cartoons in centuries long gone, had they disparaged Jesus. There was a time when Christians murdered witches by the thousands, Catholics and Protestants slaughtered each other over their beliefs, Catholics led crusades against each other over doctrinaire disputes, the Spanish inquisition burned heretics at the stake, and Jews were blamed for any disaster, such as the Black Plague, and murdered wholesale.

What has happened to change Christianity and Christian attitudes was the growth of a rational secular view encouraged by economic development, the growth of science, and the evolution of a liberal democratic culture — in brief, democratic modernity. Much of that has yet to permeate the Middle East. So we have a profound religiosity, and fundamental values imbedded in clans that emphasize tradition — authoritarian leadership, male authority, family, and childbearing.

But, these traditional, nonsecular, and irrational values are background and have always been there. They are a constant, and a constant cannot explain a change in behavior. They simply provide the fuel for the cartoon riots. The riots themselves were provoked by the Syrian and Iranian dictatorships to draw Western attention and pressure away from them, and they are led by their street warriors, the imans and mullahs, who are always eager to stir up believers against the West and its threatening infidel values.

Rather than looking at the riots as a clash of civilizations, consider them a tactic in political warfare. They remind me of the Soviet engineered anti-nuclear and anti-American mass demonstrations in Europe during the Cold War. Much was made of them being a reflection of popular opinion, when in reality they were well planned and executed by local communists who on orders from Moscow played on the nuclear fears and fundamental ignorance of the young and excitable. The cartoon riots are similar and should be looked at in the same way — as war by other means.

What can be done? In the short run, we have to understand that this is political warfare, so condemn it, and continue our pressure on Syria and Iran. In the long run, the democratization and economic development of the Middle East and other Muslim dominated nations will gradually shift their people toward secular, rational, and democratic values.

In the meantime, don’t let such riots and demonstrations fool you, as they are intended to do.

Links to Share

” Cartoon Riots”:

Widespread street demonstrations and riots are produced historically by propaganda for specific political purposes, beginning with the storming of the Bastille and murder of Ancien Regime officials in 1789. Steve Kellmeyer provides illuminating historical perspective on today’s Islamic riots ostensibly protesting religious intolerance in Danish newspaper cartoons.

“Islam and Freedom and Democracy (Updated, Revised Data)” Dean is someone who looks at the data, and we all benefit by it.

“Learn about Islam through pictures “ Not your usual travel pics.

“When People Freely Choose Tyranny” By Michael Ledeen:

Those of us who advocate democratic revolution are often criticized for an excess of naïveté, for failing to recognize that the passion for freedom is not universal, and that there are many people — perhaps even many peoples — who despise democracy. Given half a chance, these self-proclaimed ‘realists’ say, much of the world will choose tyranny. True enough, I know it well. But it doesn’t lead me to be more tolerant of tyranny, it reinforces my passion for democratic revolution.

RJR: I disagree with Ledeen’s whole assumption that if given a true choice between freedom and tyranny at the ballot box, people will choose tyranny.

“The Myth of a Moderate Hamas” By Barry Rubin:

A few months ago I was invited by an embassy to meet a visiting delegation to discuss European policies toward Hamas and Hizballah.      “Before I decide,” I asked, “tell me what you think about this issue.”      “Oh,” replied the diplomat, “we’ve already decided to deal with them.”      “If you already have made up your minds,” I answered, “why should I come to talk about it?”      Now, as the Financial Times says in a January 18 article, the European Union is preparing to do business with Hamas despite the fact that it is on their list of banned terrorist groups because they worry “that heavy handed actions by the EU could prove counterproductive, pushing Hamas further from the political mainstream.”

An expert on the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Barry Rubin is always worth reading.

” United States: The Congress and Democracy Promotion” On the 2005 Congressional “Advance Democracy Act,” still pending in the Senate. A very important act, but being held up by the usual suspects.

Read them and weep

Is Islam The Enemy? #2—No!

December 28, 2008


Is Islam The Enemy?

December 28, 2008

[First published April 17, 2006]I have searched the literature for analyses of Islamism and its terrorists that would bare its roots and provide the understanding needed to fight the War on Terror knowledgeably. There is no dearth of studies, reports, and essays, of course, and their diversity of analyses and conclusions, not to mention differences over details, reminds me of the professional head scratching during the first years of the Cold War. Among the most informative and useful article (in pdf) I found is that by Ladan Boroumand and Roya Boroumand. They are Muslim sisters from Iran and professional historians. Ladan Boroumand received her doctorate from the French Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris; her sister Roya earned her doctorate from the Sorbonne.

They point out:

• the Marxist-Leninist and fascist sources of Islamism (missed by a large majority of American analysts);
• the corresponding totalitarian nature of Islamism;
• that Islamism and its terrorism must be clearly distinguished from Islam;
• and that Iran is the home base of Islamism and its associated terrorism.

In sum, the strategic arrow points to Iran. This means that the democracies must not allow this leader of the Islamist terrorist pack to get nuclear weapons. This is not a conditional. This is an absolute for the War on Terror and Western national security.

I have excerpted the heart of the sisters Boroumand article below (a painful process, since there is so much that is good in it). I hope this will encourage you to read the whole thing.

The Boroumands begin with a question:

“Why?” That is the question that people in the West have been asking ever since the terrible events of September 11. What are the attitudes, beliefs, and motives of the terrorists and the movement from which they sprang? What makes young men from Muslim countries willing, even eager, to turn themselves into suicide bombers?….

….Islamist terror first burst onto the world scene with the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in November of that year….

Before the Iranian Revolution, terrorism was typically seen as a straightforward outgrowth of modern ideologies. Islamist terrorists, however, claim to fight on theological grounds: A few verses from the Koran and a few references to the sunna (“deeds of the Prophet”) put an Islamic seal on each operation. The whole ideological fabric appears to be woven from appeals to tradition, ethnicity, and historical grievances both old and new, along with a powerful set of religious-sounding references to “infidels,” “idolaters,” “crusaders,” “martyrs,” “holy wars,” “sacred soil,” “enemies of Islam,” “the party of God,” and “the great Satan.”
But this religious vocabulary hides violent Islamism’s true nature as a modern totalitarian challenge to both traditional Islam and modern democracy. If terrorism is truly as close to the core of Islamic belief as both the Islamists and many of their enemies claim, why does international Islamist terrorism date only to 1979?….

There is in the history of Islam no precedent for the utterly unrestrained violence of al-Qaeda or the Hezbollah….To kill oneself while wantonly murdering women, children, and people of all religions and descriptions … has nothing to do with Islam….

The man who did more than any other to lend an Islamic cast to totalitarian ideology was an Egyptian schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna (1906–49)….he founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 with the express goal of counteracting Western influences. By the late 1930s, Nazi Germany had established contacts with revolutionary junior officers in the Egyptian army, including many who were close to the Muslim Brothers. Before long the Brothers, who had begun by pursuing charitable, associational, and cultural activities, also had a youth wing, a creed of unconditional loyalty to the leader, and a paramilitary organization whose slogan “action, obedience, silence” echoed the “believe, obey, fight” motto of the Italian Fascists….

From the Fascists—and behind them, from the European tradition of putatively “transformative” or “purifying” revolutionary violence that began with the Jacobins—Banna also borrowed the idea of heroic death as a political art form.…Following Banna, today’s Islamist militants embrace a terrorist cult of martyrdom that has more to do with Georges Sorel’s, “Reflexions sur la violence,” than with anything in either Sunni or Shi’ite Islam….

Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), the Brothers’ chief spokesman and also their liaison with the communists, framed an ideological response that would lay the groundwork for the Islamism of today.

Qutb was a follower not only of Banna but of the Pakistani writer and activist Sayyid Abu’l-A’la Mawdudi (1903–79), who in 1941 founded the Jamaat-e-Islami-e-Pakistan (Pakistan Islamic Assembly), which remains an important political force in Pakistan, though it cannot claim notable electoral support….He denounced all nationalism, labeling it as kufr (unbelief). Using Marxist terminology, he advocated a struggle by an Islamic “revolutionary vanguard” against both the West and traditional Islam, attaching the adjectives “Islamic” to such distinctively Western terms as “revolution,” “state,” and “ideology.” Though strongly opposed by the Muslim religious authorities, his ideas influenced a whole generation of “modern” Islamists.

….Qutb’s brand of Islamism was informed by his knowledge of both the Marxist and fascist critiques of modern capitalism and representative democracy. He called for a monolithic state ruled by a single party of Islamic rebirth…. His ideal society was a classless one where the “selfish individual” of liberal democracies would be banished and the “exploitation of man by man” would be abolished. God alone would govern it through the implementation of Islamic law (shari’a). This was Leninism in Islamist dress.

When the authoritarian regime of President Gamel Abdel Nasser suppressed the Muslim Brothers in 1954 (it would eventually get around to hanging Qutb in 1966), many went into exile in Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, and Morocco. From there, they spread their revolutionary Islamist ideas—including the organizational and ideological tools borrowed from European totalitarianism—by means of a network that reached into numerous religious schools and universities. Most young Islamist cadres today are the direct intellectual and spiritual heirs of the Qutbist wing of the Muslim Brotherhood.

….we can detect the Brothers’ influence as early as 1945 in Iran, the homeland of most of the world’s Shi’ites….

Khomeini himself first took a political stand in 1962, joining other ayatollahs to oppose the shah’s plans for land reform and female suffrage….The turning point came in 1970, when Khomeini, still in Iraq, became one of the very few Shi’ite religious authorities to switch from traditionalism to totalitarianism. Much like Mawdudi, he called for a revolution to create an Islamic state, and inspired by Qutb, he condemned all non-theocratic regimes as idolatrous….Qutb’s ideology was used by Khomeini’s students to recapture for the Islamist movement a whole generation influenced by the world’s predominant revolutionary culture—Marxism-Leninism.

Khomeini became a major figure in the history of Islamist terrorism because he was the first truly eminent religious figure to lend it his authority. For despite all its influence on the young, Islamism before the Iranian Revolution was a marginal heterodoxy. Qutb and Mawdudi were theological dabblers whom Sunni scholars had refuted and dismissed. Even the Muslim Brothers had officially rejected Qutb’s ideas. As an established clerical scholar, Khomeini gave modern Islamist totalitarianism a religious respectability that it had sorely lacked.

….The Leninist characteristics of [Khomeini’s] rule—his policy of terror, his revolutionary tribunals and militias, his administrative purges, his cultural revolution, and his accommodating attitude toward the USSR—alienated the majority of his fellow clerics but also gained him the active support of the Moscow-aligned Iranian Communist Party, which from 1979 to 1983 put itself at the service of the new theocracy.

Khomeini’s revolution was not an exclusively Shi’ite phenomenon. Not accidentally, one of the first foreign visitors who showed up to congratulate him was the Sunni Islamist Mawdudi; before long, Qutb’s face was on an Iranian postage stamp….Khomeini’s own interest in creating an “Islamist International”—it would later be known by the hijacked Koranic term Hezbollah (“party of God”)—was apparent as early as August 1979.

As these ties suggest, Islamism is a self-consciously pan-Muslim phenomenon. It is a waste of time and effort to try to distinguish Islamist terror groups from one another according to their alleged differences along a series of traditional religious, ethnic, or political divides (Shi’ite versus Sunni, Persian versus Arab, and so on). The reason is simple: In the eyes of the Islamist groups themselves, their common effort to strike at the West while seizing control of the Muslim world is immeasurably more important than whatever might be seen as “dividing” them from one another.

The Lebanese-based, Iranian-supported Hezbollah is a case in point….A closer look at the organization reveals the strong influence of Marxism-Leninism on the ideology of its founders and leadership. The group’s current leader, Mohammad Hosein Fadlallah, influenced by Marx’s and Nietzsche’s theories on violence, has openly advocated terrorist methods and tactical alliances with leftist organizations. Hezbollah is a successful creation of the Islamist “Comintern.”….

Also inspired by the Iranian Revolution was the independent Sunni terrorist network that later became the basis of al-Qaeda….

The influence of Iran’s Islamist revolution was also cited by the members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad who gunned down President Anwar Sadat in October 1981….

The Islamization of the Palestinian question is also partly due to Khomeini’s influence on the Palestinian branch of Islamic Jihad….

As these examples show, such distinctions as may exist among these terrorist groups are overshadowed by their readiness to coalesce and collaborate according to a common set of ideological beliefs. These beliefs are properly called “Islamist” rather than “Islamic” because they are actually in conflict with Islam—a conflict that we must not allow to be obscured by the terrorists’ habit of commandeering Islamic religious terminology and injecting it with their own distorted content….

The Islamic Republic of Iran also rests on heterodoxy, in this case Khomeini’s novel and even idiosyncratic theory of the absolute power of the single, supreme Islamic jurisprudent (faqih). It was not a coincidence that one of the first uprisings against Khomeini’s regime took place under the inspiration of a leading ayatollah, Shariat Madari. Officials of the regime have admitted that most Iranian clerics have always taken a wary view of Khomeinism….

What gives force to the terrorist notion of jihad invented by the Iranians and later embraced by bin Laden is not its Koranic roots—there are none—but rather the brute success of terrorist acts. Bin Laden has spoken with particular admiration of the Iranian-sponsored suicide truck bombing that killed 241 U.S. Marines and others in Beirut on 23 October 1983, precipitating the U.S. withdrawal from Lebanon. Bin Laden was also not the first to think of setting up training camps for international terrorists—the Tehran authorities were there before him….

As they released the hostages in January 1981, the Tehran authorities crowed over their victory, which Prime Minster Mohammad Ali Rajai called “the greatest political gain in the social history of the world” and an act that “had forced the greatest satanic power to its knees.” At first glance this claim might seem foolish, for the United States had said no to the revolutionary government’s demands to hand over the shah and unfreeze Iranian assets. But a closer look shows that the Iranian Islamists had in fact scored a big political and ideological victory over both the United States and their domestic opponents, and thus had ample cause for jubilation….

….The U.S. government in 1979 clearly had neither the will nor the ability to stage a coup against the Islamic Republic. But totalitarians typically speak an esoteric language of their own devising….By Rafsanjani’s logic, therefore, any Iranian group that spoke of human rights was thereby revealing itself as a tool of the United States.

….the revolutionary regime began using the Stalinist tactic of claiming that anyone who spoke in favor of a more representative government was really a U.S. agent. With the hostage crisis, the Islamist regime was able to make anti-Americanism such a leading theme that Iranian Marxists rallied to its support, while Moscow extended its tacit protection to the new theocracy….

From the taking of the hostages in Tehran in 1979 until the terrorist attacks of last September, Western policy makers too often implicitly downgraded the claims of justice and shirked their duty both to their own citizens and to the cause of human rights by refusing to pursue the terrorists with any real determination. Considerations of “pragmatism” and “prudence” were put forward to justify a sellout of justice which, in one of the cruelest ironies revealed by the harsh light of September 11, proved not to have been prudent at all….

Islamist terror poses a different but no less grave problem for those of us (including the authors of this essay) who come from Islamic countries, and it carries a special challenge for Muslim intellectuals….

For the last several centuries, the Islamic world has been undergoing a traumatizing encounter with the West. Since this encounter began, our history has been a story of irreversible modernization, but also of utter domination on the one side, and humiliation and resentment on the other. To Muslim minds the West and its ways have become a powerful myth— evil, impenetrable, and incomprehensible. Whatever the Western world’s unfairness toward Muslims, it remains true that Western scholars have at least made the effort to learn about and understand the Islamic world.

But sadly, the great and brilliant works of the West’s “Orientalists” have found no echo in a Muslim school of “Occidentalism.”

We have been lacking the ability or the will to open up to others. We have opted for an easy solution, that of disguising in the clothes of Islam imported Western intellectual categories and concepts. In doing so we have not only failed to grasp the opportunity to understand the West, we have also lost the keys to our own culture. Otherwise, how could a degenerate Leninism aspire today to pass itself off as the true expression of a great monotheistic religion? The Islamists see themselves as bold warriors against modernity and the West, but in fact it is they who have imported and then dressed up in Islamic-sounding verbiage some of the most dubious ideas that ever came out of the modern West, ideas which now—after much death and suffering—the West itself has generally rejected….

Our incapacity to apprehend reality lies at the root of our paranoia. If we were to take a clear and careful look at the West, we would see that it draws its strength from its capacity for introspection and its intransigent self-criticism….

….We might have grasped that, not long ago, Westerners faced the same obstacles that we face today on the road to democracy. Citizens in the West fought for their freedoms; in this fight they lost neither their souls nor their religion. We too must roll up our sleeves to fight for freedom, remembering that we are first and foremost free and responsible human beings whom God has endowed with dignity.


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