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Fault Lines in the Middle East

Ron Coody - 2/22/2011

Since the uprising of the Tunisian people followed by the dramatic protest of millions in Cairo against Husni Mubarak, shaking and realignments have spread across the Middle East in a display of unleashed energy reminiscent of earthquakes along a fault line. In this case the fault lines are political, religious and economic, with rulers pushing in one direction trying to hold back the will of people pushing in the opposite direction. In Tunisia and Egypt the people have won the contests.

More recently people in Yemen, Bahrain, Jordan, Libya, and Iran have taken to the streets. The pattern seems to be similar in each place. Rulers who have protected their governments and their power at any cost, including the use of police and military force, are faced with opposition calling for a different form of government.

From the American perspective with its long history of constitutional democracy, the tendency is to interpret the recent Middle Eastern events as evidence of the inevitable march of democracy throughout the earth,
even into places that have been ruled for decades by despots and dictators. The hope of some past US presidents, like Woodrow Wilson, has been that the American model of government of the people, by the
people and for the people, would be lifted up as the best model for the human individual and that other countries would eventually take notice and try to follow the democratic example. In the 1920's the Muslim
majority country of Turkey under the leadership of Kemal Ataturk took exactly that path, looking to Europe and the US as a model of secular democratic government for their newly founded republic. They tossed out the Islamic Sharia law and introduced law based on Swiss and French constitutions. Ataturk changed the Turkish alphabet from Arabic to Latin and the calendar from Islamic to Gregorian. These and many other
radical changes created a society unique in the Muslim world, one that speedily carried Turkey into the 20th century as a developed country and opened the door for it to become a candidate to membership in the
European Union. Many now watching the Middle East in the early 21st century have eagerly concluded that something similar will happen in the Arab Muslim majority countries.

That might very well be a premature conclusion. First, there is no Ataturk figure taking the lead in the Arab world. The leadership vacuum opening in Egypt and other Arab countries will be filled, but the prime
candidates at the present are groups at the other end of the spectrum from Ataturk, groups like the Muslim Brotherhood who disdains secularism and democracy and wants to introduce not Western law but Sharia.
Second, the Muslim majorities in the Arab countries generally share a dislike of if not hostility toward the West, America and Israel in particular. Unlike Ataturk who admired the accomplishments of the West,
these groups reject and disapprove of Western culture since it is non-Muslim. Third, under the vision of Ataturk, the Islam in Turkey lost its expansionistic edge. He abolished the Islamic Caliphate (something like a combined Pope and Supreme political/military role). Many Arabs and other Muslims hope to regain Islamic expansionism, reclaiming the lost glory...and perhaps even the lost Caliphate. Fourth, even in Turkey, the Ataturk Westward orientation has lost ground. Over the past eight years the ruling Islamic-leaning government in Turkey has gradually reversed Ataturk's vision, taking Turkey into new alliances with the East.

Based on these observations, one could conclude that the fault lines in the Middle East are shifting in the opposite direction from the time Ataturk transformed Turkey. The uprisings in Egypt and other countries
have challenged the status quo, but the status quo for the past couple of decades has been, if not a real democracy, at least in cases like Egypt, a regime that tolerated peaceful relations with the West.
Maintaining peace with the West does not excuse corruption and abuses in the regimes, but it should not be completely dismissed either. Now the potential exists for regimes to emerge that not only act with hostility toward the West, but violate human rights in the name of some form of implemented Sharia law, as is currently happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Obviously the situation is complex and surprises could occur. Yet while optimistic Americans hope for the best as they watch millions of Arabs risk life and limb marching against oppression, the momentum is building for many Arab countries to exchange regimes that have accommodated the West for a revival of Islamic Sharia. With the information available, the hope for true democracy needs to be tempered with historical perspective and realism.