THE LIBERAL OPTION:

Reviving Mideastern Democracy: We Arabs need the West's help to usher in a new Liberal Age. (SAAD EDDIN IBRAHIM, November 26, 2003, Wall Street Journal)

For about a century...from around 1850 until about the time of the Free Officers' coup that toppled the monarchy and brought Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser to power in 1952, there flourished in Egypt a Liberal Age that is all too often unjustly forgotten in discussions of Arab politics today. Leading thinkers and writers such as Taha Hussein and the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Naghib Mahfouz characterize that period, but there were literally hundreds of others. This was also a time of relative sectarian peace and tolerance. The great Oxford historian Albert Hourani's "History of the Arab Peoples" is a good primer on this and other aspects of political development in that period.

The Liberal Age came to an end after the Arab defeat at the hands of Israel in the 1948 war and the subsequent rise of military regimes across the Arab world. With ideological roots in populist nationalism, these governments soon became entrenched autocracies. Civil society groups, political parties, trade unions and the independent judiciary were among their early victims.

When we founded the Ibn Khaldun Center and as we guided its work throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, we had the Liberal Age very much in mind. We saw ourselves not as builders from scratch, but as revivers of a great (but not perfect) tradition that had existed not only in our country but also in Syria, Iraq, Iran, Morocco and elsewhere. We were and we remain determined that this liberal tradition--and the Egyptian Court of Cassation, as witnessed in our legal case, is part of this legacy--will not be forgotten. We believe that if these ideas receive the exposure they deserve, the memory of this tradition and, more importantly, the still-living relevance of its core teachings on rights, freedom, transparency, and justice, can play a large role in showing that democracy does indeed have a reasonable chance of putting down roots and growing in the Middle East.

Instead of the "paralysis by analysis" that comes from cataloguing all the familiar reasons why our peoples will "never" be ready for democracy, we choose to remind ourselves of the liberal options that were once open and can be open again.

Perhaps the appropriate posture to take is dubious, but hopeful?

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 26, 2003 8:44 PM