Islamic Democracy? We Hope?

An article in the New York Times this morning about Islam points out how careful we should be about how we approach the region. The article argues that Egyptians are coming to identify themselves more than as Egyptians or as Arabs. The key points are:

Hezbollah’s perceived triumph has propelled, and been propelled by, a wave already washing over the region. Political Islam was widely seen as the antidote to the failures of Arab nationalism, Communism, socialism and, most recently, what is seen as the false promise of American-style democracy....The lesson learned by many Arabs from the war in Lebanon is that an Islamic movement, in this case Hezbollah, restored dignity and honor to a bruised and battered identity....Hezbollah’s perceived victory has highlighted, and to many people here validated, the rise of another unifying ideology, a kind of Arab-Islamic nationalism.

Of course, these three elements of identity are intertwined, but it matters which one is prominent. Until 1967, Nasser’s successes made Arabism seem to be the wave of the future. After the perceived success of the October War, Sadat made an Egypt-centered identity respectable. Now, with the success of Hezbollah in tweaking Israel's nose in Lebanon and the success of Al-Qaeda and the other Islamic fundamentalist groups elsewhere, a devotion to Islam seems to promise a way to gain self-respect and the world's respect.

Behind the growth of Islam lie myriad failures. In some ways the defeat in the Six-Day War at the hands of Israel is still felt. Arab failures in science, in economics, and in politics when compared to the world-changing success of the West, has left the Arab world hungry for the kind of achievements that once had Baghdad the capitol of a legendary, thriving empire.

Egyptians and Arabs more generally see nothing like that. They see regimes that are corrupt, intellectually bankrupt, and either weak or tyrannous.

We hope to make these regimes democratic. We assume that if they become democratic, beholden to the people, they will become a source of pride and lead to achievements that will make the Arab world thrive. That assumption is partly true: pride and achievement are not the necessary result of democracy, but in the modern world it is hard to sustain either without it.

A danger is that the democracy we promote will be seen as antithetical to Islam. Certainly Osama Bin Laden and his lieutenants think it is. Many in the West have questioned whether democracy and Islam are compatible. And, in truth we will find little comfort in the pronouncements of religious parties.

Yet we must be willing to tolerate parties that are willing to compete in democratic elections, promise to retain the political structures essential to a democracy, and declare themselves bound by the expressed will of the electorate. Are there such parties? I don't yet know. Perhaps.

The essential thing is that we cannot allow democracy and America to become so intertwined in the minds of the Arab world that they will abandon the promise of the former out of distaste for the latter. In the long run, the establishment of democratic regimes will benefit us. In the short run, however, we find them hard to like and to comprehend.