Mr. Bush, who was alleged to be a CEO president but turned out to be a foolish preening lazy president, has ballyhooed democracy as the sound-bite answer for all nations who wish to be US. If this sounds good, how can it be bad? Yet we see in Iraq that democracy only meant voting for the selected. And we see in Palestine that real election, the voice of a people who were sick of corruption and wanted to throw the bums out, resulted, just like in Iraq, with the minority simply not giving up (albeit with help from us and Europe). So, what's wrong with democracy "over there?" And how can it survive so well here, even in the darkness of a Cheney faux presidency?
Moustapha Safouan, an 85-year old Egyptian intellectual, who grew up in Alexandria, the son of a professor of philosophy, has written what may turn out to be the most important analysis of the current middle east 'problem,' Why Are the Arabs Not Free? - The Politics of Writing, Critical Quarterly, London/New York, 2007. In this brief (97 page) volume Safouan reveals what ought be common knowledge amongst the likes of the Friedman's and the Cheney's (whose certainty that bringing so-called democracy to the region would be well worth the risks) yet, it isn't.
Did you know that spoken Arabic has hundreds of local dialects, that can differ as much as French to Spanish? Did you know that the Koran is only available in the ancient language, spoken nowhere outside certain intellectual circles and between the well-educated clerics, because the Koran has never had a Martin Luther or a King James? Did you know that literature isn't translated into the vernacular at all, and that the Arabic that's used for literature is written in a 'dead language' referred to as the grammatical one, as opposed to the vernacular, the one people grow up speaking (like our students conducting their studies in Latin)? Do you know that illiteracy is shockingly high among common people, such that many must hire scribes, as if it were still the fifteen century?
Did you know that there is no such idea as 'the rights of man' debated among religious revolutionaries - for example the right to assemble, speak freely, to dissent, and that the states are so controlling over the lives of ordinary citizens that there can't be worker owned businesses governed by the workers, or trade unions governed by members, or guilds composed of and governed by its members? Did you realize that people can be jailed for mocking their leaders? Did you know that there has never been a peaceful change of power in any of the Arabic speaking countries? Did you know that the so-called radical schools that teach Islam have no 'idea' competition, because although we can read the Koran in English, Arabs can't read it in their own mother tongues? Did you know that the only way to galvanize the people against their oppressive leaders is through Islam, by calling the leaders infidels, and that there is no thought of replacing a government with representative government, that is answerable to the people, but only a call for replacement with a new religious government?
And, did you know that the oppressed people see us as part of the problem, because we back their repressive governments, for our own purposes.
There is no easy answer to the problems in the middle east, but I think perhaps it's time to insist to the governments we support that they provide free, secular education, that they teach their population to read, and that they conduct state business in a language the people can read, understand and discuss. Wouldn't this be more radical than delivering democracy? Maybe the most radical contribution would be library cards, (and free libraries, filled with translations of everything to spoken language) because how can a people generate ideas freely if they aren't allowed to use their own spoken language for reading and writing?