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Embracing democracy, Arab style
Anthropologist Lauri King-Irani says that although Arab perspectives of democracy differ from Western, particularly American notions of unfettered liberty, they are no less "democratic".
By Laurie-King Irani
The Daily Star, Beirut, September 15, 2003
Must the political culture of democracy be uniform? Does democratization automatically entail Westernization? These questions are no longer academic.
The desire to democratize Iraq is a key reason justifying the messy attempt at regime change in Baghdad. According to some pundits, the violence now afflicting Iraq stems not from Western leaders’ poor judgment in launching a pre-emptive war, but from the impossibility of establishing democracy in the Arab-Islamic world. Official statements and media narratives suggest that a large percentage of the American public assumes that “democratization” means “Americanization.” Implicit in such assumptions is a theory of human nature rooted in far-reaching, and unexamined, value judgments about American and non-American ways of doing democracy.
Nowadays, “democracy” seems interchangeable with “liberty” in official US statements. These are some of President George W. Bush’s favorite terms, along with “war on terror” and “God bless America.” According to Bush, a prime motivation for the Anglo-American war on Iraq was to free the Iraqi people so they could vote, administer and worship as they pleased. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared that freedom was inherently “untidy.” By its very nature, it poses an inevitable risk that individuals might behave badly as they pursue their self-interest.
Freedom, according to this view, means individuals have the inviolable right to do whatever they please. This is a characteristically American view particularly for this administration with its ethos of rugged, in-your-face individualism. Who needs the United Nations? Have gun; will travel.
This view of freedom is neither valued nor encouraged in most Arab societies. Free-for-all liberty, called fitnah in Arabic, is considered a social and moral anathema. The types of people likely to act according to this highly individualistic conception of freedom are known in Arabic slang as maslahjiyeen selfish, uncaring people who trample on others’ dignity and rights while pursuing their own narrow aims. In the cultural and moral context of Arab societies, such people may gain power, but are never truly respected.
Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his sons pursued freedom to criminal extremes of individualism, arrogating to themselves powers and privileges they were unwilling to share with others. Coercion and cruelty were the bases of their rule. Anyone challenging their selfish conception of liberty ended up in mass graves.
Had the Bush administration consulted with anthropologists before occupying Iraq, it might have learned that democracy is not alien to the Arab-Islamic world; nor is the Arab version a replica of American democracy. Democracy in the Arab world is a collective, not an individualistic, concept. It is more a matter of duties than rights, more about obligations than freedoms. In Arabic, you spell democracy “d-i-g-n-i-t-y.”
One cannot have dignity in isolation, like a cowboy walking tall, proud and alone, reveling in freedom from all constraints. Dignity (karameh in Arabic) implies the existence of others because it is all about proper relationships with them. To treat others with dignity is to accord them full humanity, to respect the inviolability of their person, will, feelings, rights and pride.
“Karameh” was a recurring term in Nazareth, the largest Palestinian city in Israel, where I conducted anthropological field research a decade ago. It entailed nobility of spirit, generosity and compassion. It also requires freedom, but with a “relational” twist: Karameh entails granting others the space, right and freedom to participate and collaborate in public without compulsion through networks linked by ties of mutual obligation, concern and support.
The key difference between American and Arab views of democracy was brought home when a communist activist in Nazareth stopped by my house one day and complained about growing communal tensions in Nazareth following the collapse of the USSR. Before my friend left, he asserted: “If there was ever to be true democracy in the Arab world, it would have happened here first, among Palestinians inside Israel; but it hasn’t.”
I asked: “Why would it have happened here first? Because of your exposure to Israel’s parliamentary democracy?” “No!” he exclaimed. “Because our leaders are not allowed to have a secret police, like most Arab leaders. They have to get their power from the people, or not at all! They have to serve the public, not crush it with commands.”
My friend’s requirements for a democratic political system, viewed from an Arab perspective, emphasized interdependence, not liberty alone. He stressed the need for a mutual give-and-take between leaders and followers based on respect rooted in dignity. His comments implied the need for dialogue between representatives and represented, and relationships through which leaders generate support, trust and legitimacy. A good leader must attract followers by showing a readiness to sacrifice, care, assist and discharge duties, not just enjoy privileges and issue decrees.
Perhaps Americans should listen more and lecture less to Arabs about democracy. Nazareth, a diverse Palestinian city located in an Israeli administrative and political context that categorizes Arabs as second- or third-class citizens, may provide insights into the requirements of democratization in the Arab world.
In the course of my research, I asked people what democracy meant to them. I usually received answers to the effect that “democracy is not just rule by the majority, but also respect for the minority.” These statements conveyed a view of democracy as a set of mutual responsibilities, as recognition of the dignity of individuals, whether they were part of a majority or not.
Considering Palestinians’ experiences of being a marginalized minority in Israel, such sensitivity to minority perspectives was not surprising. Yet these emerging narratives echoed long-standing cultural conceptions of a person as embedded in social networks held together by bonds of mutual obligation and respect, buttressed by values centering on personal dignity. Given Nazareth’s cultural, political and class diversity as the largest Arab city in Israel, overlapping networks that provided support, solidarity and nurturance also provided individuals with daily experiences of identities, life-styles and practices different from their own.
Simply strolling down Nazareth’s main street was to pass through a range of cultural spaces, enabling one to interact with young Muslim women in veils, older communist women from the Democratic Women’s Club, an Egyptian Coptic priest, the Russian wife of a Palestinian Communist Party official, American Baptist missionaries, a Maronite shopkeeper selling radios to Russian immigrants from a neighboring Jewish community and Muslim bakers and mechanics singing along with Umm Kulthoum or Majida Roumi songs as Japanese and Irish tour groups walked to the Church of the Annunciation.
Everyday experience demonstrated that Nazareth was neither politically uniform nor culturally homogenous. The question of difference was never a simplistic opposition between “Arab” and “Jew,” but rather, a complex set of oppositions between different Christian sects, between Muslims indigenous to Nazareth and Muslim refugees, and between people of different classes and gender, having different ideologies.
Western commentators often malign diverse social settings such as Nazareth, Beirut and Baghdad as fertile terrain for ethnic conflict and inter-communal violence. It is not diversity, however, that creates political tension; what does is when different communities fail to relate to one another politically and economically, fail to be incorporated into larger political and economic relationships, and fail to respect individual and collective dignity. Listening to the voices, experiences and views of people in multifarious settings debunks those Western theories claiming that “clashes of civilizations” are inevitable, and defies those who speak insidiously of “Arab-Islamic exceptionalism” that necessarily derails democratic systems of governance.
Ethnocentric observations devoid of a cultural context can fuel “Orientalist” perspectives that slight historical and geostrategic considerations, notably the problematic, external imposition of both the nation-state as an administrative framework for the Arab world and the dynamics of the global political economy, pinning all political failures, instead, on an “essential cultural predilection” of Arabs and Muslims for tyranny and repression.
For a people who value dignity of self and other and regard it as crucial in everyday life, for a people who invented urban, plural social spaces, nothing could be further from the truth. Perhaps it is time for leaders such as Bush and Rumsfeld to learn from, rather than lecture to, Arabs and Muslims. Humility and good manners are, after all, key to local as well as global civil societies.
Laurie King-Irani teaches anthropology at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. She wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/opinion/15_09_03_c.asp
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