Good and Bad Arabs

More than 600 dead and 4,000 wounded is an unwarranted slaughter. Obama has requested for the Egyptian military to exercise two virtues alien to the culture and traditions of their country: tolerance and moderation. Although the U.S. president said that his nation could not and did not want to tell the Egyptian people how to conduct their domestic affairs, that is precisely what he did. He asked for free elections and a limited power of law. Frankly, it seems highly unlikely to me that they will please him.

The United States, without doubt, has been the most successful nation on Earth from the 20th century to the present day. The republican experiment of the thirteen colonies, which seemed destined to fail by the end of the 18th century, gave way to a surprisingly wealthy and powerful nation that today is the only superpower on the planet. This phenomenon, however, cannot be imposed from the outside; it must be imitated voluntarily.

Unlike in the nation of Washington and Jefferson, the core of the tension that prevails among Islamist Arabs is not about limiting government authority, protecting individual rights and creating relations based on power in meritocracy and equality under the law (for which tolerance and moderation are fundamental) like the United States established when it broke away from England.

The dispute in the Arab world is of another nature: It seeks to settle by force the mortal conflict between secular, mostly anti-Western military dictatorships that consider themselves progressive yet progress very little and the partisans of an oppressive theocratic model that aims to create an Islamic state ruled by Shariah. The latter group’s main objective is, unfortunately, to destroy the state of Israel and fight against the infidels, be they Coptic Christians or Lebanese Maronites.

It is, in the end, a fight to the death between secular, crude, brutal military authoritarians full of nationalist political ideas tinged with fears of socialism and religious members filled with fantasy beliefs that are committed to Allah and want to subjugate mankind under the authority of the Quran.

For the rest of the world, therefore, it is generally not about choosing between liberal democrats and religious fundamentalists (that would be too easy). Instead, we choose between military despots (who are usually corrupt killers) and religious fundamentalists (who are almost always aggressive and dangerous). This tends to lead to massacres where the fanatics are either the victims or the victimizers in the name of the ultimate truth revealed to Muhammad in the desert.

Washington does not understand this awful quandary. Many politicians and public servants suffer from ethnocentrism. They think that all countries can and must create a state model in which individual liberty presides, served by a government controlled by a constitution and limited by checks and balances.

In reality, this formula is extraordinary, but in order for it to work, there has to exist beforehand a society (or at least a ruling elite) willing to practice tolerance, as defined by the decision to live together peacefully in spite of all the things they don’t like. They must place themselves under the authority of the law, admit that their truths and beliefs aren’t infallible and practice civic cordiality with adversaries that deserve respect, though they may never come to love them.

These elements are exceptional in Arab societies. There are individuals who fit that profile and they even gather in small establishments that proclaim these rules of the game. I have known liberals from Morocco, Syria, Lebanon and Tunisia, which leads me to believe that they also must exist in Egypt and the rest of the Arab geography. However, they lack the necessary power to steer their countries in the July 4, 1776 direction that the Americans adopted in Philadelphia.

As long as this change of values does not take place, it is naive to try to choose between “good” and “bad” Arab governments. The alternative is much more agonizing.