A year after the Tunisian uprising, opinion is divided over the revolts it inspired across the Middle East.
Many in the West wonder whether the “Arab Spring” is heading for an “Islamist winter.” In Arab countries, too, pessimism is on the rise with some early leaders of the revolt regretting the regime changes they helped bring about.
As it happens, pessimism about the Arabs’ ability to build free societies has been a feature of global political thinking for over two centuries.
The Arabs’ first significant encounter with the modern world built by the West came in 1798 with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. The invaders claimed they were bringing the ideals of the French revolution such as ending tyranny and transforming “subjects” into citizens.
After that, in every encounter with the West, Arabs and Muslims in general were defeated and humiliated. How to face the modern Western world — one that Arabs and Muslims had played no role in forming — became the central issue of politics in the Islamic sphere.
In the 19th century, it inspired a pan-Islamic movement known as tajaddud (“renovation”), which campaigned for Western-style institutions, modern state structures and professional armies — as well as for a reform of sharia.
Tajaddud advocates called for better treatment of women and the right of girls to education.
The movement’s failure to quickly achieve these high goals prompted the same kind of pessimism we witness today. Nevertheless, over decades, many of those goals were achieved.
In most Muslim lands, the Napoleonic Code effectively replaced sharia, while the few Muslim nations that retained their independence set up Western-style bureaucracies and armed forces.
In the Ottoman Empire, accounting for half the world’s Muslims, tajaddud inspired the “re-organization” reforms in 1839. In Iran, the movement fostered the Constitutional Revolution of 1906.
As tajaddud faded, a new movement, Islah (Reform), took up some of its ideals, preaching an Islam freed of superstitions and myths accumulated over centuries. It, too, eventually faded away — after pushing religious reform into the mainstream of Islamic debate, and paving the way for a new movement: an-Nahda (Revival), which sought to build Western-style nation-states permeated with Islamic values.
By the mid-20th century, whatever was left of an-Nahda had been buried under an avalanche of Western ideologies that came to dominate the politics of Muslim lands: Nationalism, Communism, Fascism (Ba’athism for Arabs, Khomeinism in Iran).
For all their failure to achieve their declared goals, the movements advocating modernization, religious reform and democratization have secured important changes across the so-called Muslim world:
* The overwhelming majority of Muslims have discarded the concept of the caliphate as an anachronism.
* Most Muslims identify themselves in terms of their nationality rather than religion. (Identity in terms of religion is popular among Muslim minorities in Western countries.)
* Though expressly forbidden by Islam, many features of Western economics are now widely accepted in the Muslim world. These include banking, insurance, stock exchanges, limited responsibility companies, taxation, pension schemes and the charging of interest.
* Though forbidden by the Prophet, women have entered politics in all Muslim countries save Saudi Arabia. The largest Muslim country, Indonesia, has had a woman president. Four other women have served as prime ministers in Muslim countries. In Iraq, 50 percent of parliamentary seats are reserved for women. Even Saudi Arabia has announced it would let women vote in municipal elections.
* Many aspects of the “Infidel” culture forbidden by sharia are widely present and popular in all Muslim lands. These include radio, newspapers, TV, cinema, theater, concert halls and opera houses. Music, painting, sculpture, dance and drama, though banned under Islam, are equally popular with Muslim masses.
* Tourism, also forbidden except for pilgrimage, is now an integral part of any Muslim economy. Each year, millions of Muslims also travel to “Infidel” territory, including the United States, as tourists.
* All Muslim countries (except Saudi Arabia) now accept elections as a method of choosing governments. True, elections in Muslim lands are seldom fully free and fair — but admitting that the people’s vote, not Divine Will, is the source of power is a revolutionary break with the tenets of Islam.
* Virtually all Muslim countries have adopted Western–style systems of justice in preference to sharia courts. They now apply prison terms — though in sharia there is no prison, only corporal or financial punishment.
* More than 99 percent of Muslims attend Western-style schools and universities, not Islamic madrassahs.
The movements that have marked Muslim history since 1798 failed in the short term but succeeded in the longer term. Thanks to them, the Muslim world is a very different place today.
The same could be true of the uprisings that began to shake Arab nations a year ago.
In immediate terms, they might look doomed to failure. Yet they’ve already achieved a great deal by putting democracy at the heart of the debate in the Muslim world.
