Excerpts: Democracy in Arab countries.Foreign investment.Islam's future 26.2.2000

+++"Democratic dearth seen obstacle to Arab progress", Jordan Times 25-26
Feb.'00

FULL TEXT:
BEIRUT (R) - Participants at a U.N. meeting attributed poor living
conditions in the Middle East to a dearth of democracy.

"Without democratic governance, then all human development projects are

in jeopardy," said Mahdi Hafez, regional adviser of the U.N. Industrial

Development Organisation. "Governance and human rights issues are key
to
our countries."

The three-day conference, which opened on Wednesday, was organised to
discuss ways to strengthen the role of the U.N. Economic and Social
Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA).

ESCWA, which groups 13 countries, said in a recent report that
expenditure
by Arab nations on basic services such as healthcare and education was
minimal, with Jordan on top spending 3.7 per cent of its gross domestic

product.

Some participants blamed the poor social indicators on the lack of
widescale
democratic practices, which they said were a result of cultural factors
such
as the "pharaoh syndrome."

"Whenever any Arab takes a position of authority, they automatically
become like pharaohs, issuing orders without consultation," said Ismail
Sabri
Abdullah, a former Egyptian minister and current head of the
Cairo-based
Third World Forum.

"This is a characteristic of our society; not only are the leaders
undemocratic, the people are too."

Alien concept

Abdullah said democracy was an alien concept to many Arabs, who were
not taught to think for themselves at home or school.

"It's very difficult to impose democracy for above. People have to be
used
to having rights so that they can use them," he told Reuters.
"Therefore,
education is key."

ESCWA's director general, Hazem Beblawi, agreed. "Arabs lack the
concept of democracy. They don't understand it." In many parts of the
region, demanding democracy was akin to treason, Moroccan Researcher
Ali Oumlil said.

"We have some of the worst human rights violations yet rights defenders
are
seen as foreign agents, idolators, anarchists, the enemy," he said.

"Human rights are such a hot topic in this region yet our countries are
lagging
behind. Why?"

Ghassan Salameh, lecturer and author of "Democracy without Democrats,"
said most Arab leaders had no interest in toppling the status quo by
giving
the people a say in their actions.

"Democracy did not emerge because people asked for it," he said on the
sidelines of the meeting.

"If we look at Europe, we will see that the establishment of a
democratic
government did not happen accidentally. It was set up to remedy a civil
war
or facilitate taxation, that is there was a vested interest. Once we
have a
similar situation in the region, then we will have democracy."

+++ " Undermining investment" By Sherine Abdel Razek, Al-Ahram Weekly
10-16 Feb.'00

HEADING:"Egypt is desperate for foreign direct
investments(FGI). Yet there is much that needs
to be done"

QUOTES FROM TEXT:"Egypt's low-cost labour -- at about $0.55 per
hour one third that of Turkey,
and one tenth of Israel -- constitutes a major competitive
advantage."

"Poor vocational skills in Egypt is cited as a major problem
for foreign investors. Training schemes
swallow a great deal of money. The situation is worsened by
domestic labour laws seen to be
weighted in favour of employees."

"Other perceived constraints include red tape, a complicated
tax system, low levels of skilled labour
and high custom and import duties."

EXCERPTS:
... what is the reason of the relatively low level of FDI{foreign
direct investment}to Egypt? So what are investors looking
for when choosing an investment site outside the borders of their
own country? The most obvious answer is high returns,
higher than can be posted on investments in the country of origin
. . ..
...the average return on American companies' investments in Egypt is
22 per cent, higher than in other emerging markets
and twice the average return in Europe.

Egypt boasts sound macro-economic indicators combined with
investment-friendly policies crowned by issuance of
the investment guarantees and incentives law of 1997, according to
which companies incorporated in Egypt are
guaranteed against the expropriation or suspension of licenses. New
companies formed under the investment law
enjoy tax holidays that range from five to 20 years, according to
the location of the project. Egypt has, too, signed a
number of treaties for the "encouragement and reciprocal protection
of investments" with several countries, and has
entered into treaties with its major trading partners to avoid
double taxation.

... Egypt's cost competitiveness, compared to other emerging
markets, is high in terms of labour, electricity, shipping
costs and telephone tariffs.

Egypt's low cost labour -- at $0.55 per hour one third that of
Turkey, and one tenth of Israel -- constitutes a major
competitive advantage. According to the World Economic Forum 1996
competitiveness report, which surveyed 49
countries on a variety of competitive indicators, Egypt ranks the
10th for qualified engineers, 12th for secondary and
technical training and 15th for the supply of skilled labour.

Poor vocational skills in Egypt is cited as a major problem for
foreign investors. Training schemes swallow a great
deal of money. The situation is worsened by domestic labour laws
seen to be weighted in favour of employees.

Other perceived constraints include red tape, a complicated tax
system, low levels of skilled labour and high custom
and import duties.
. . .
The tax system also operates as a disincentive to investors. The
standard rate on corporate profits is 40 per cent,
while the tax norm in the region is around 30 per cent.

A report issued by the Egyptian Centre for Economic Studies on
corporate tax and investment decisions in Egypt
described the tax system as "complicated".

"The numerous tax rates applied to different activities, granting
tax incentives to certain activities rather than others
and tax holidays of different durations according to the location of
the project fails to offer a neutral tax treatment to
investors," stated the report.

Moreover, tax holiday schemes have not so far proven to be effective
as a means of encouraging investments. The
tax relief given to American companies in Egypt is, for example,
claimed by the US government when income is
remitted.

Input procurement procedures, too, remain cumbersome.... that tariff
and import tariff protection is still high. Tariff
differentials exist between different product groups and there are
import bans on certain commodities, including poultry,
textiles and clothing.

Efforts to give exporters access to imported inputs are undermined
by excessive paperwork and low service
standards... .

... overall charges for seaport services are triple those of
competitors while the physical condition of ports and the
quality of services are both low.

Customs clearance of imported materials is also troublesome.
Procedures are complicated -- clearance of food
stuffs, for example, requires entry permission from five agencies
starting with the atomic energy agency and ending
with the government organisation for export and import control.

+++"Time for the temporal" by David Hirst, Al-Ahram Weekly 10-16 Feb.'00

HEADING::" The struggle is coming to a head. The conflict between
Islamism's two ultimately irreconcilable concepts --
divine authority and popular sovereignty -- is
being decided in Iran today and, writes David Hirst, the
reverberations will be felt throughout the Islamic
world. At stake is whether Islamism is capable of the reform
and evolution necessary for its survival in any
form at all, or if it will condemn itself to inevitable
self-destruction"

EXCERPTS:
The elections will decide, 21 one years on, whether Islamism is
capable, in its foremost stronghold, of the reform
and evolution needed for its own survival in any form at all, or
condemns itself to eventual self-destruction. .... And never
before have a people been so clearly, democratically, called upon to
choose between the two. It is a contradiction between
the two basic concepts on which, constitutionally, the republic has
always rested, the 'sacred' -- reflecting the
sovereignty of God over the people's affairs -- and the 'popular'-
reflecting the people's sovereignty over itself. It
has plunged the regime into a relentless, all-pervading power
struggle between its two main wings: the reformists, led
by President Mohamed Khatami, and the arch-conservatives, headed by
the leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

In the Khomeinist theocracy, the clergy assume full temporal power.
The awesome task of interpreting God's will on
earth goes to the leader, aided by other institutions, like the
Guardian Council, drawn largely from the clerical
hierarchy. The conservatives insist that the 'sacred' has precedence
over the 'popular.' Ayatollah Ali Meshkini, head
of the Council of Experts, put it very frankly. Khamenei's powers
were "absolute," and "subject to no conditions of
any kind and popular elections have no influence on the matter."
Till divine justice was restored on earth, he had
guardianship over "the goods and souls of men." On the other hand,
Khatami, though a cleric himself, puts popular
sovereignty above God's, or, more precisely, the right of a clique
of self-appointed Mullahs to exclusive
interpretation of it ...

The struggle between these two ultimately irreconcilable concepts is
now coming to a head. The conservatives will
lose it. They will do so. Either peaceably and constitutionally, for
in any fully free and fair election, the reformists will
repeat the overwhelming success that they did with Khatami's own
landslide victory in the presidential elections of
May 1997 and take majority control of parliament, the one key
institution that is dependent entirely on 'popular'
sovereignty. Or they will do so violently and unconstitutionally.
. . .
Whichever way the Iranian conservatives go down, their defeat will
reverberate through fundamentalism's ranks
everywhere. And just as, at its birth, the republic gave an immense
boost to a movement then in general ascent, so,
now, it will dramatise and accelerate its decline. For Islamism is
in decline. That might seem a bold assertion in the
light of so much that suggests the contrary. For one thing, Islam,
both as faith and culture in the broadest sense, has
clearly undergone a revival almost everywhere. For another, the
notion that religion should have a bigger role in
public life has put down deep roots; most governments have responded
to this sentiment with pious gestures, from
the prohibition on bank interest imposed by the new military rulers
of Pakistan to the Egyptian government's retreat
from new legislation on women's rights that would have permitted
them to travel abroad without their husbands'
written permission..... In Indonesia, once a bastion of
inter-communal tolerance,100,000 demonstrators surge through the
streets of Jakarta; addressing them, Amien Rais, president of the
People's Consultative Assembly, says: "Tolerance is
absurd -- massacre the Christians."

... Islamists are still the most powerful opposition force in just
about every Muslim country;
from Malaysia -- where, in recent elections, the Islamists greatly
increased their representation in parliament -- to
Nigeria -- one of whose federal states has just adopted the Shari'a,
or 'holy law' -- they continue to make gains. In
that most obvious, bloody front line of the 'clash of
civilisations', Chechnya, a small band of Islamists, infused with
extraordinary valour, are keeping the might of Orthodox Russia at
bay.... The 'Talibanisation' of Pakistan now looks an
ominous possibility. And if, one day, Colonel Gaddafi of Libya
falls, it will very likely be an obscure Islamic insurgency
which, in alliance with disaffected soldiers, brings it about.

... the evidence of Islamism's decline is far more impressive. Egypt
was Islamism's first great fountainhead; it was there that
the famous, hypnotic cry "Islam is the solution" first went up. With
the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan
El-Banna made the first, systematic attempt to harness Islam to
modern political purpose, and one of his
disciples, Sayed Qutb, executed under President Nasser, wrote what
some call the bible of Islamism. He prefigured its five
main features: 1 Ideologically, it thrived on the failure and
exhaustion of secular-modernist credos -- nationalism,
parliamentary democracy, Marxism -- which Muslim societies
borrowed from the West, and on whose basis, throwing off
direct Western control, they sought to build their own modern,
post-colonial order. 2. Sociologically, its natural
constituency was those middle and lower classes which should have
most benefited from the new order, but in the end
suffered most from it. Typically, its rank and file were found in
the vast slums, peopled by rural immigrants, that grew up
around great metropolises from Jakarta to Cairo; its intellectuals
and activists were the products of massive,
but poor-quality, educational programmes, and usually science rather
humanities graduates, with minds predisposed to the
mechanical implementation of received theories. . . .
3. The most defining, yet paradoxical, feature of this 'sublimated
Leftism' was that, while bent on 'renewal', it looked for it in
what the Arabs untranslatably call Asala, a 'return-to-roots
cultural authenticity', and found it, above all, in a seventh-century
book, the Qur'an....political Islam was doctrinally bound, in its
pure form, to reduce human freedom to a minimum. In the
perfect Islamic state, there could be no place for 'democracy', that
Western secular 'corruption' and direct affront to the only
legitimate sovereignty, God's, exerted through a government acting
on His behalf.

4. Islamists had two alternative routes to political power. One was
that of the revolutionaries -- the Bolsheviks of
Islam. For them all Muslim societies had sunk into a state of
complete Jahiliya, or pre-Islamic 'Ignorance.' They
sought to 're-Islamicise' them from the top. For Qutb, a 'vanguard',
drawn from the select few 'who know what
nobody else knows', undertook this task. They found sanction in all
that is most intolerant in the Prophet's
revelations, generally those from his state-building, Madina period,
as opposed to the earlier, evangelising, Meccan
one; they relied on the verses of the sword -- "And slay them
wherever ye find them" -- not on the better-known
injunction to tolerance: "There is no compulsion in religion." All
they knew of democracy was their own equivalent of
the Marxist-Leninists' 'democratic centralism.' Their most typical
manifestation was Egypt's Jihad or Al-Gama'a
Al-Islamiya, or Algeria's Groupes Islamiques Armés (GIA).

The other route -- Islamicisation from below -- was that of the
gradualists, the 'Mensheviks' of Islam, who opposed
the all-or-nothing violence of the 'Bolsheviks.' Through Al-Da'wa,
the 'Call,' they sought the long-term re-education
of society, purifying individual minds of secular deviation. Through
the 'propaganda of the deed,' or good works,
they tried to show their capabilities and undermine the state's
political legitimacy. Most claimed to believe in
democracy, buttressing this claim with arguments -- heretical for
the 'Bolsheviks' -- that the Qur'anic concept of
Shura, or 'consultation,' is democratic in intent too. But, given
their essential beliefs, it was never quite clear what
they would do with democracy once they attained power through it.
Most Islamists -- from the Jaamat-i Islami of
Pakistan to the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) of Algeria -- belonged
to this mainstream.

5. Islamism was supra-national, promoting the unity of the Umma, or
Islamic 'nation.' There was no directing
bureau, no 'Comintern', the nearest thing to that being the
occasional get-together of the national chapters of the
Egyptian-dominated Muslim Brothers. But, given the community of
sentiment, the traffic of ideas, especially radiating
from Islam's Middle East heartlands to its outlying provinces, it
was axiomatic that Islamists achieving power in one
country would have an exemplary effect on others who had yet to do
it. The record shows, however, that in the
quarter century since it became the dominant, dynamic ideology of
the Muslim world, Islamism has not merely failed
to supplant nationalism, or narrower ethnicities, it has often
exploited them for its own purposes; neither has it
improved the conditions of its natural socio-economic constituency,
or gratified the quest for cultural identity; and, in
the three places where it achieved power, it has signally failed to
be a model to others.

Just as, in Marxist theory, the communist revolution should have
begun in the most advanced capitalist societies of
Europe, so, logically, the Islamist revolution should have begun in
the Arab heartlands of the orthodox Sunni faith.
That it actually happened in Shi'ite Iran made it, like the Russian
Revolution, a kind of aberration. In fact, however,
Shi'ism had its own peculiar revolutionary potentiality, a very
powerful one as it turned out, because the official
religious hierarchy -- traditionally at odds with temporal power in
a way the subservient Sunni hierarchy never was
-- led it. Khomeini sought to transcend the historic schism of
Islam; and, indeed, Sunni Islamists were vastly
encouraged by the emergence of the world's first 'Islamic state.'
Yet his supra-national ambitions soon proved vain.
. . .
When Saddam Hussein went to war against the new-born republic,
Khomeini resolved not
merely to expel the invader but to turn Iraq into the world's second
Islamic Republic. Yet, in striking contrast with a
Stalin who took over much of East Europe after the Second World War,
Khomeini failed even with his next-door
neighbour, and that despite the fact that Shi'ites account for 65
per cent of Iraq's population. When, as he put it, he
"drank from the poisoned chalice" of the Gulf war cease-fire, he was
acknowledging the fatality of the blow dealt to
his pan-Islamic vision. The republic henceforth only projected its
influence, in any serious way, by exploiting narrow
sectarian means, the best, most enduring example being Lebanon's
Hizbullah, in their often unsavoury role as an
instrument of Iranian foreign policy during the civil war and,
subsequently, their more elevated one as the 'Islamic
resistance' to Israeli occupation of the south.

... The revolution had come about in a genuine, nationwide,
spontaneous insurrection, embracing almost all classes and
political currents. But it was soon 'Bolshevised'; its most
reactionary, bigoted component, the traditionalist Mullahs, steadily
eliminated everyone else, from communists to moderate Islamists, till
they monopolised the whole. The apparatus of
repression they constructed to protect this 'divine-political' system
far outdid the Shah's merely man-made one in brutality,
torture and mass executions. In a cynical debasement of religious
fervour, the Basij forces, first recruited from the poorest
and least educated to become the backbone of 'human wave' assaults on
the Iraqi army, were turned into the shock troops of
internal control, now endowed with Islamically-sanctified immunity
from any retribution in the case of shoot-to-kill excesses
in the suppression of popular unrest.

The revolution has also betrayed its original 'Leftist' bent. It had
begun with a disposition in favour of its natural
constituency, those it dubbed the Mustad'afeen, or the 'Oppressed'.
But, in time, the conditions of the ordinary
people grew immeasurably worse. Islamism-in-power was incapable of
applying what, in theory, was supposed to
be an 'Islamic economy' rooted in 'Islamic justice', superior, in
its morally formed essence, to the two great
alternatives, socialism or capitalism, of the secular-materialist
world.. . . .It has not only lent Islamic blessing to
market-oriented policies, it encouraged the bazaar merchants and
unproductive, speculative capitalism at the expense of
modernisation, industrialisation and social welfare.

The Mullahs proved no more capable of remedying the characteristic
Third World socio-economic ills than the
secular regimes they despise. Vulnerable to the same temptations as
secular elites, they have gone into business
themselves. Mullah capitalism -- turning the great Bonyads, or
'Foundations,' philanthropic organisations built on
confiscated property from the Shah's time, into vast profit-making
corporations -- was as corrupt, inefficient and
feather-bedded as anyone else's.

Only two things are really Islamic about a system that sought,
vainly, to Islamicise everything from labour laws to
school curricula. On the one hand there is the stress on
ostentatious, state-sponsored religious ritual and symbols,
the retrogressive interpretation of penal and personal status laws,
and the imposition of outward observances, most
famously the chador, in public life. The other is the carefully
vetted religious qualifications of those who run its key
institutions. The combination has turned people in ever increasing
numbers not only against the Mullahs but also
against Islam itself.

The signs are everywhere, from the fall in attendance at religious
schools to the way in which parents give
pre-Islamic, Persian names to their new-born: if they are looking
for Asala, Iranians now chiefly find it in nationalism,
not religion.
. . .
Like the Islamic Republic, the world's only two other examples of
Islamism-in-power were largely the outcome of
special circumstances: in Sudan the interminable struggle of the
Arab/Muslim north to control the Christian/animist
south; in Afghanistan the vacuum left by 20 years of foreign
invasion, war, civil war and institutional collapse.
. . .
Elsewhere, Islamism remains an opposition force only; and generally
speaking, though still a potent one, it is losing
ground. Among the exceptions, Chechnya is now the most dramatic
example of Islamism ascendant. It has its own
long history of resistance to Russian domination rooted in a native
tradition of militant Sufi mysticism. But it is also
the latest, powerful magnet for those 'permanent revolutionaries',
the 'Trotskyists' of Islam, who, as itinerant
'jihadists,' or 'holy warriors', move from battlefield to
battlefield in defence of the faith. They began in Afghanistan,
joining local Mujahideen in the struggle to drive out the Soviet
invaders. They came mainly from the Arab world; the
war over, they either returned to their native lands to become the
leaders of the violent, 'Bolshevist' wing of an
'internal' jihad, or they continued it, against the infidel foe,
wherever opportunity arose, from Kashmir to the
Caucasus. . f.
. . .
Pan-Islamic they may be, but, in practice, what their idealism
shows is that when Islamism is allied with a local
patriotism, as in Chechnya, it is at its most formidable. This
'Islamo-nationalism' explains why, in Palestine, the
militant group Hamas commands a much greater appeal among those who,
on ideological grounds alone, would
have little time for it. It profits from its advocacy of 'armed
struggle' and the 'total liberation' of Palestine, aims and
methods which Arafat, the representative of secular nationalism, has
abjectly abandoned. The same is true, though
less intensely, for Lebanon's Hizbullah.

It is striking, however, that, by and large, Islamists-in-opposition
are still in the ascendant only in the peripheral
regions of the Umma. This, argues the leading Islamic scholar
Olivier Roy, is because, there, they are a relatively
new phenomenon. Thus in the Caucasus and Central Asia the moment of
opportunity only came with communism's
collapse, a decade later than in the Middle East, and they still
have time to play themselves out. However
impressive, they are quixotic, isolated, confined largely to remote
and mountainous terrain, a proof that there is really
no such thing as the pan-Islamic solidarity Islamists clamour for.

And sharing their flaws, they are unlikely, in the end, to be any
more successful than their brethren in the heartlands.
These are the best yardstick of the movement's performance -- and,
mostly, they have known only decline and
failure. A failure brought about, first of all, by the extraordinary
resilience -- despite its decadence -- of the existing
order they had made it their business to remove. The first, most
spectacular demonstration of that took place in
Mecca itself, when, within a year of the Iranian Revolution and
doubtless inspired by it, a band of fanatics --
'Bolshevists' par excellence -- seized the Grand Mosque and held it
for several days. ...

.In 1981 some 20,000 people died in the central Syrian city of Hama,
stronghold of a Muslim Brother uprising
against President Hafez Al-Assad. The outside world barely had an
inkling of the desperate insurgency which, in the
early '80s, Iraqi Shi'ites mounted against Saddam Hussein. Lately it
has been the turn of the Egyptian and Algerian
regimes to bear the brunt of the continuing Islamist challenge. It
came from both the 'Menshevik', essentially
non-violent mainstream -- Muslim Brothers in Egypt, the FIS in
Algeria -- and the 'Bolsheviks' -- Al-Gama'a
Al-Islamiya and Jihad in Egypt, GIA in Algeria. Less despotic than
Iraq or Syria, they nonetheless fought back
harshly, suppressing the political rights of non-violent and violent
alike, and waging military campaigns as vicious as
the 'terror' they combated.

By 1997, Egypt's Al-Gama'a was forced to declare a unilateral
cease-fire; in Algeria, the Islamic Salvation Army,
the FIS's military wing, has now joined forces with the regime
against the GIA. In most other countries there was no
significant 'Bolshevik' threat at all, and the 'Mensheviks' were
ready to play by local rules, however far short of true
democracy these fell. That sometimes earned them political space. In
Jordan and Kuwait, where they support the
hereditary regimes, Islamists have maintained a sizeable number of
deputies in parliament. It sometimes earned them
none at all. President Bin Ali of Tunisia has ruthlessly suppressed
the relatively liberal strain of Islamism that
Al-Nahda stands for. Turkey, the Middle East's most democratic
Muslim country, eventually broke its own rules to
exclude the Islamists from the power they had legitimately won.
. . .
Islamism may still be much the most potent opposition in almost
every Muslim country, but it is declining, and it
owes that decline to its own inherent shortcomings as well as state
oppression. In any case, even at the height of
success it never commanded overwhelming popular support. For even in
reasonably free and fair elections, it never
won anything like an outright majority. In that fateful, 1992
Algerian poll, whose abolition triggered the civil war, the
FIS only garnered 3.25 million votes in a 13-million electorate.
Almost everywhere it has been the same pattern of
strong initial gains followed by a steady decline subsequently.
. . .
The loss of popularity grows partly out of the way
Islam-in-opposition has conducted its struggle, with the
'Bolshevists' discrediting the movement as a whole. A mainstream
leader like Abbas Madani, of Algeria's FIS,
simply cannot comprehend the savagery perpetrated in Islamism's
name, or so he claims. "We must not even deny
that Islam is responsible," he said, "because to deny is to
acknowledge that Islam is so much as accused. It is Islam
that is being massacred, and how can the killed be the killer, the
lamb the wolf?" But after all due allowance is made
for the provocations it suffered at the hands of brutal regimes, it
is hardly surprising that, with the verses of the
sword always there for the invoking, Islamism has a tendency to
gravitate towards its own most extreme expression.
Hence those climactic horrors, the massacre of tourists in Luxor,
and the mass, throat-cutting barbarities of Algeria.
. . .
Egypt's Muslim Brothers may still gain from good works in Cairo's
slums, but it has become clear to many Egyptians
that, in power, they would just as readily betray their natural
socio-economic constituency as the Iranian Mullahs.
Was it not an Islamic company, Al-Rayan, which cost thousands of
pious Egyptians their modest, life-long savings
when its Islamically correct, but otherwise recklessly immoral,
pyramid scheme collapsed?
. . .
And almost invariably their idea of piety is to simply to be more
extreme than the milieu in which they operate. Thus
in Kuwait, the Islamists wanted to form a religious police, like
Saudi Arabia's Mutawwa', "with a branch in every
neighbourhood to patrol and watch citizens," sever thieves' hands,
ban all sexual mixing, and punish people for
drinking even in the privacy of their homes. In their excess, they
alienated many who might otherwise have
supported them. In Saudi Arabia itself, a model for such Kuwaitis,
the prevailing orthodoxy is already so extreme
that Saudi Islamists tend to seek a raison d'être in the even more
extreme.

A global movement which came to reform others is now in need of its
own reforms. Without them
Islamism-in-power will self-destruct, and Islam-in-opposition never
achieved power in the first place. Enlightened
Islamists acknowledge it. And they increasingly acknowledge the
vital importance of what, in its original, textual,
return-to-roots essence, Islamism began by wholly rejecting:
democracy.

There are doubts, among secular intellectuals, about how far even
these enlightened ones will go at the expense of
basic doctrine, how influential they are on the movement as a whole.
One, Egypt's Fahmy Howeidy, perhaps the
most celebrated Islamist commentator, put his finger on the central
problem, when he said that, unlike Christianity,
"the only way Islam can be separated from any field of human
activity, politics included, is by changing or sacrificing
its teachings. I don't think any Muslim believer would condone such
a step."

Clearly, it is much harder to subject the Qur'an, held to be the
literal word of God, to the kind of higher criticism to
which Christian scholarship subjected the bible. But until Islamists
acquiesce in that necessity they will never truly
accept modern universal values based on reason alone. When the
Egyptian academic Nasr Hamed Abu Zeid
propounded the thesis that, once revealed to Mohamed, the Qur'an
became subject to human reasoning, many
Islamists called him as an apostate, and brought an initially
successful legal action requiring him to be forcibly
divorced from his wife. Insofar as Islamists do accept universal
values, they always have to seek Qur'anic
legitimation for them. This, if they really want to, is something
which, however implausibly, they always manage to
contrive; there is a process of reasoning, usually apologetic in
tone, casuistic and philosophically shallow. "They pick
and choose what they want," said secularist Egyptian scholar Hussein
Amin, "For them the sacred texts are as full of
alternatives as Lenin's sayings for communists."

There are obvious exceptions, like the Taliban and its Pakistani or
Central Asian extensions, but, in the heartlands,
with its greater maturity and experience, the concern for democracy,
and related values of pluralism, human rights,
religious tolerance, sexual equality is strengthening. For Howeidy,
it ranks as the primary value, the indispensable
foundation of any true Islamic state. He deplored the results of the
recent Indonesian elections, in that they brought
to power a one-time Muslim activist, Abdul-Rahman Wahid, who decries
the application of the Shari'a and declares
that Islam should have "a role in morals, education and worship, but
not in affairs of state." But he rejoiced at the
restoration of democracy, "which is the gateway to Shari'a, while
tyranny is its death."

This point of view has won support, most startlingly, even among
former 'Bolsheviks' of Al-Gama'a and Jihad. On
the face of it some of them have undergone a complete conversion
from the verses of the sword to their Qur'anic
antithesis, "there is no compulsion in religion." They are trying to
form legal, above-ground political parties. In a
charter of his new beliefs, one of their leaders, Gamal Sultan,
wrote recently: "we must acknowledge that, till now,
democracy is the best practically available means for guaranteeing
public rights and freedoms, and they are the
essence of Islam." He conceded that among Islamism's secular
adversaries "there have always been many noble,
high-minded, moral and humanist" individuals.

This evolution in thinking is found mainly in Islamism's younger
generation. In Egypt, young members of the
mainstream Muslim Brothers have broken with their old-guard leaders,
authoritarian and dogmatic, and are trying to
set up a party of their own, which even includes a leading Christian
intellectual among its founding members. In
Turkey, there is a similar dissidence among young Refah activists.
By and large, the more democratic the system
under which they operate the more democratic Islamists themselves
become, the readier to sacrifice ideological
purity to the exigencies of achieving power, to reduce their
fundamental tenet, the sovereignty of God in human
affairs, to a purely metaphysical concept. One scholar sees a
"Darwinian selectivity" at work; "even if the profession
of democracy is tactical, the very process of working within a
democratic framework may transform this
opportunism into a more substantive commitment."

The great obstacle, here, is the regimes. When Islamism threatens,
not a single one, not even the most democratic,
has permitted democracy to run its full, unfettered course. They
accuse Islamists of wanting to annul democracy as
soon as they achieve power through it; but, in practice, it is they
-- most obviously in Algeria or Turkey -- who have
done precisely that before the Islamists ever had the chance. They
may not have actually created the great Islamist
peril. But, at an earlier stage, when other perils loomed larger --
the Egyptian left for President Sadat, the Russian
invasion of Afghanistan for the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the
Kurds for Turkey, the PLO for Israel -- they
encouraged and co-opted even the most violent and fanatical of them.
But they certainly did create, or failed to
correct, the environment in which Islamism grew and flourished, an
environment marked, in varying degrees, by
tyranny and oppression, ethnic, clan and sectarian exploitation,
corruption, nepotism and gross disparities of wealth
-- in short by the accumulating ravages of their own misrule.

For some the Islamists have become as useful enemies as they once
were protégés -- just look at the way the
Turkish military and intelligence establishment is now turning on
the underground Hizbullah fanatics it once co-opted
for its own purposes. They are a pretext for evading change and
reform; it is easier to blame deep-rooted
socio-economic ills on 'returnees from Afghanistan' than it is to
remedy their underlying causes.

In the bleak political picture which the heartlands of Islam present
today, change, when it comes at all, is rarely for
the better. Is Iran now set to become the momentous exception? Its
parliamentary elections could usher in, and by
peaceable, constitutional means, the most far-reaching
transformation in the nature of the ruling system since the
Revolution. If they do, the republic would continue to call itself
Islamic. For after all, it is Islamists who would be
leading the change. But ideologically and institutionally -- with
the victory of the people's sovereignty over God's, a
hard-line Mullahs' God, and the emergence of a reformist parliament
that acts upon it -- the change would be so
far-reaching that the world's first Islamic state would be well on
the way to becoming its first post-Islamic state, a
secular, democratic one in all but name.

In dissolving itself, the theocratic order Khomeini founded would at
last become a model, for the whole Muslim
world, of a kind he never imagined.

Dr. Joseph Lerner, Co-Director IMRA
www.imra.org.il