From: Terry W. Colvin (fortean1@mindspring.com)
Date: Mon Jun 02 2003 - 16:20:55 MDT
Los Angeles Times News Service, Via The Dallas Morning News, 1 June 2003
By Milton Viorst
Iraq's Shiites, 60 percent of the population, most of them fervently
religious, have stunned U.S. officials who gave us the war to
overthrow Saddam Hussein. Not only do the Shiites reject our
occupation, but they also dismiss the Western-style democracy that we
were assured they would welcome.
It took hardly more than recent full-color pictures in newspapers and
on television of Shiite men flagellating themselves until blood
streamed from their flesh to make the case that we are dealing with
people we don't know. Ironically, Saddam's regime had barred
self-flagellation as barbaric. For believers, his fall did not mean
freedom to adopt a constitution and elect a parliament; it meant
freedom to suffer the stings of whips for a martyr who died 13
centuries ago and to demand an Islamic state.
When communism died at the end of the 1980s, Vaclav Havel, the poet
who became president of Czechoslovakia, declared that "democratic
values slumbered in the subconscious of our nations". His words
suggest that these nations waited only for the sunshine of spring to
awake to the democracy that had lain dormant within them. Indeed,
societies liberated from communism, including Russia, navigated the
currents of Western values to adopt democratic systems, though they
sometimes perilously scraped the rocks. So did the European
countries delivered from fascism after World War II -- Italy and
Germany, then Spain and Portugal.
But democratic values do not slumber in the subconscious of the
Islamic world. Free elections threaten to bring religious extremists
to power in Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan and even Turkey, which has been
working at democracy for nearly a century. Were free elections held
in Saudi Arabia, fanatics would surely triumph. In 1992, elections
brought Algeria to the edge of Islamic rule, triggering a civil war
that still rages. Given the substantial divisions in Iraq's
population, and the power of religion within its Shiite majority,
free elections there would probably produce the same outcome.
Years ago, I asked an elderly philosopher in Damascus, Syria, to
explain the difficulty Arabs have in mastering democracy, and he
answered, ruefully: "The Islamic world never had a Renaissance."
What he meant, I later understood, was that the steps toward
secularism that Western society first took in mid-millennium are yet
to be taken -- or, at best, have been taken only hesitantly -- within
Islam.
The seminal notion that the Renaissance introduced to the West was
that mankind, not God, is at the hub of the social universe. It held
reason to be as important as faith, and urged men and women to claim
responsibility, free of clergy, for their own lives.
Under the influence of texts from ancient Greece, Muslims in their
Golden Age considered and rejected these ideas before passing the
texts on to Europe. After triggering the Renaissance, the ideas led,
over quarrelsome centuries, to the Reformation, the Enlightenment and
the Scientific Revolution. While Islam remained wedded to desert
tradition, Europe created a civilization imbued with a sense of
individual identity, in which men and women asserted rights apart
from those of the community. These ideas, for better or worse,
became the foundation of the secular culture that characterizes
Western civilization today.
Religion by no means disappeared. Instead, it was redefined as a
personal bond, a relationship of choice, between the individual and
God. The redefinition made Westerners comfortable separating worship
from the state. True, segments of the Catholic Church, Orthodox
Jewry and evangelical Protestantism still question this arrangement.
But the secular idea constitutes the foundation of mainstream Western
values. Without it, democracy -- and the civil society that, along
with the press, supports it -- would be impossible.
This process has largely bypassed Islamic society. Muslims like to
say that "Islam isn't just a religion; it's a way of life." What
they mean is that there is no barrier between faith and the everyday
world, between what is sacred and what is profane. It is not so much
that Muslims are more pious than Westerners. It is that the
imperatives of the culture impose limits on diversity of outlook,
whether religious or social. These imperatives suppress the demand
for personal identity, leaving believers with little tolerance for
the free and open debate necessarily at democracy's core.
Ironically, Saddam's Baath regime once promised to introduce Iraq to
secularism. It went further than any other Arab state in
emancipating women, curbing clerical power, promoting literature and
arts and advancing universal literacy within a framework of modern
education. Its tragedy is that these seeds of democracy were
subsumed under the world's most brutal tyranny, crushing their human
potential. After 1,400 years of Islamic conservatism and 25 of
Saddam, there is little likelihood that a disposition to democracy
slumbers in Iraq's psyche.
From President Bush on down, officials who are presiding over the
rebuilding of Iraq would be wise to remember that the values at our
system's heart have been a thousand years in the making. No doubt
Iraq's Shiite majority is happy at Hussein's downfall, but American
lectures on the virtues of replacing him with democratic rule fall on
uncomprehending ears. So much must first be done to lay a groundwork
of individual freedom and responsibility, values that Iraqis must
willingly embrace.
At the moment, the majority is more comfortable with the familiar
idea of Islamic government. The U.S. administration's vision of a
Middle East reshaped by Western democracy, starting with Iraq, is
naive and, moreover, delusive.
-- Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1@mindspring.com > Alternate: < fortean1@msn.com > Home Page: < http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/8958/index.html > Sites: * Fortean Times * Mystic's Haven * TLCB * U.S. Message Text Formatting (USMTF) Program ------------ Member: Thailand-Laos-Cambodia Brotherhood (TLCB) Mailing List TLCB Web Site: < http://www.tlc-brotherhood.org >[Vietnam veterans, Allies, CIA/NSA, and "steenkeen" contractors are welcome.]
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