In Squaring Off, Zócalo invites authors into the public square to answer five questions about the essence of their books. For this round, we pose questions to Cairo-based journalist John R. Bradley, author of After the Arab Spring: How Islamists Hijacked the Middle East Revolutions.
Bradley argues that the Islamist groups that have taken power in the Middle East are here to stay-with dire prospects for liberal democracy anywhere in the region. He analyzes the uprisings and their aftermath in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Bahrain to explain this shift and its consequences.
1) Is it possible that some Islamist groups have already peaked, and in certain countries secular agendas will grow?
The opposite is true. It’s secularism and liberalism that have peaked in the Arab world. Remember, Saddam Hussein was a secularist, as was Ali Abdullah Saleh, Hosni Mubarak, Colonel Gaddafi, and Ben Ali. It’s therefore not difficult to understand why most Arabs now associate secularism and liberalism with corruption, torture, tyranny, poverty, and a lack of dignity. On top of all that, the liberal elite is discredited throughout the Middle East. It’s seen as having feathered its nest and spouted rhetoric for decades without ever managing to ameliorate the behavior of the old secular regimes, far less to remove them from power and offer a viable political alternative. That’s the vacuum now being filled by political Islam. What will happen in the long-term nobody can predict. But the medium-term belongs to the Islamists.
2) You argue that Middle Eastern revolutionaries were inspired “not by a burning desire for free and fair elections, but by the dire economic circumstances” of their countries. But how does political Islam appeal to voters as a path to economic improvement?
These were not Islamist revolutions, and the people who took to the streets therefore did not have the idea that political Islam would improve their political situation. In fact, the Islamists do not offer a solution to the economic and social woes that brought the protestors into the streets. But now post-revolutionary turmoil has brought about even greater economic misery, the Islamists offer something seductive in the absence of meaningful solutions: a simple answer-Islam is the solution. The Islamists offer solace, in other words, in the face of insurmountable problems. The terrible price that the ordinary people of these countries will have to pay for that solace will only much more gradually become evident.
3) But what about a country like Tunisia, whose citizens have been accustomed to secular life for over 50 years. Can the past year alone convince them that Islam is the only solution?
It doesn’t matter what the majority are convinced of. The main problem in the Arab world is political apathy. When the deadline for voter registration passed in July of last year, a paltry 16 percent of Tunisians had bothered to register. The deadline was extended, but in the end still only 50 percent registered. We were constantly told that there was an 80 percent turnout when elections finally took place. But that was 80 percent of registered voters: in other words, the turnout was actually 40 percent. The Islamists won a plurality, because they were better organized and so almost all their voters turned out. They were a minority, but it nevertheless means that Tunisia now has an Islamist-dominated parliament despite the fact that 80 percent or so of Tunisians didn’t vote for them. It’s a situation replicated throughout the region. So I would ask you in turn: If the Islamists can take control in a sophisticated, modern, and historically secular country like Tunisia by manipulating the electoral process, what hope is there that the liberals will triumph elsewhere in the Arab world? The answer is that there isn’t any hope at
all.
4) If the Assad regime in Syria falls, could liberals in that country learn from the mistakes of their Tunisian and Egyptian counterparts and establish a political presence early on?
Hopefully the liberals in Syria have already learned from the mistakes in Tunisia and Egypt, and especially in Libya, and so they won’t overthrow the secular regime in the first place. There is in fact no popular uprising in Syria. There’s a Western-backed government-in-waiting made up of the kind of charlatan exiles we haven’t seen the likes of since Ahmad Chalabi’s grand performance in the build-up to the war in Iraq. It’s dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and is open about the fact that it is politically and financially supported by Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia! The so-called Free Syrian Army-which should be renamed the Free Salafi Army-are a bunch of international jihadis funded mainly by Qatar and Libya’s Islamist militias. The vast majority of Syrians, who for the most part are secular and sophisticated, are not going to overthrow their regime, and thus provoke the carnage and chaos that would result, just to hand the country to a bunch of hateful, murderous Wahhabis. The Western media’s unqualified support for the foreign-funded armed Islamist insurgency in Syria sickens me to my stomach. Have we not seen enough dead-end, useless, failed uprisings?
5) Is it at all possible for liberal democracy and Islamism to coexist?
It’s impossible. It’s possible for democracy and Islamism to exist, but liberalism must be sacrificed in the process. The liberal apologists for so-called moderate Islamist parties are almost always either based in the West, or if based in the Arab world have foreign passports. In other words: They have no personal stake in the outcome. It’s intellectual masturbation for them, nothing more and nothing less. To get the truth to your answer you must ask, say, a member of Egypt’s Coptic Christian or Sufi Muslim minorities, or a liberal unveiled woman, or an artist who enjoys painting nudes, or a novelist who explores the line between faith and lack of faith. I have asked hundreds of such people over the past year, and they are terrified of coming Islamist rule. The difference between them and the apologists for Islamism is that the former can’t just catch the next plane out when things go horribly wrong, as they did in Iran and they will in the near future throughout the rest of the Middle East.
*Photo courtesy of FreedomHouse.