The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (11 page)

In Turkey, the will and the desire remain. Despite recurring crises at home, despite three military interventions since 1960, Turkey has retained its commitment to democratic values, and each of the three military regimes withdrew of its own free will and gave way to a restoration of constitutional and parliamentary government. Of the fifty-one member states of the Islamic Conference, Turkey alone qualifies as a stable democracy according to Samuel Huntington's simple but effective definition: a regime in which power has been transferred twice by means of elections.' The second transfer is of crucial importance. It may happen that a government in power, through either conviction or inadvertence, allows itself to be voted out of office. It would still remain to be seen whether those who succeed it would follow its example and be ready to depart by the same route by which they came.

In Iran, the victorious revolutionaries, along with proclaiming a return to ancient Islamic values, also promulgated a written constitution and established an elected legislative assembly, for neither of which is there any precedent in Islamic precept or practice. In the Islamic republic, elections are indeed contested, and there is some freedom of debate in the assembly and of comment in the press. These freedoms are, of course, subject to the acceptance of the basic principles of Islam and of the Islamic revolution as defined by its creators and their successors. The limits to freedom of discussion have never been clearly defined, but those who cross them are subject to swift and severe retribution.

The longest and, apart from Lebanon, the most successful record of a parliamentary government in the Arab world is that of Egypt. After the overthrow of the monarchy and the creation of a new republic by the "free officers" in the years 1952 to 1954, Egypt seemed once again to be setting an example to other Arab states, this time of the final and complete abandonment of the Western form of representative and liberal democracy. Since then, however, under President Nasser's successors, there has been a tentative return to contested elections for a representative assembly and to an opposition press free to criticize within certain well-understood limits.

A brief experiment with a written constitution and an elected assembly in Kuwait was terminated by the rulers sometime before the Iraqi invasion of 1990. More recently, there have been experiments with contested elections and critical newspapers in both Jordan and Algeria. In the latter country, in January 1992, the opposition Islamic Fundamentalist Front was even able to gain a significant electoral victory. It was not, however, allowed to enjoy it, and a new emergency regime was installed in office. Except in Turkey, critics were not permitted to criticize the ruling personalities or the basic policies that they followed, nor were opposition groups, however large, permitted to vote their rulers out of power. Given the nature of these oppositions, this limitation was not necessarily undemocratic, since it is often clear that even if the rulers were to allow themselves to be voted out of power, the victors would not repeat the same error. In general, the captains and the kings still divide the Arab lands, and neither show any inclination to depart.

Besides Turkey, there is one other continuously functioning democracy in the region: Israel, which in many respects presents a curious anomaly. Israel is not an Islamic state and has not suffered the disruptions and upheavals endured by its neighbors. Yet at first sight, there seems little to encourage the development of Westernstyle democratic institutions. The majority of Israel's citizens came from countries with little or no democratic tradition or experiencein Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Since the establishment of the state in 1948, Israel has been in a continuous state of war with all or most of its neighbors, a condition frequently leading to armed hostilities. In the areas under its rule and even within its original frontiers, it rules over a large population related by language, religion, culture, and sympathies to those same neighbors. In such a predicament, the military inevitably plays a large role, and in a region where military takeovers are the norm, it might have been expected that sooner or later the Israeli generalsor colonels-would follow the pattern of the region and seize power, the more so since the Israeli electoral system of proportional representation, with its unhappy record of petty squabbling, factional pressures, precarious coalitions, and recurring deadlock, might have made such a takeover seem defensible and even desirable. This did not happen, however, and Israel remains, despite, or perhaps because of, its state of perpetual semimobilization, an aggressively civilian polity.

There have thus been only three countries in the modern Middle East where political democracy has functioned with any success and for any length of time-Israel, Lebanon, and Turkey. They are also the three most European states in the area-the first, non-Islamic; the second, only half-Islamic; and the third, wholly Islamic but with a long record of Westernization and secularism. This has led some observers to conclude that Islam and democracy are incompatiblethat is, that there is something in the Islamic pattern of social and political behavior that impedes or prevents the proper working of parliamentary institutions. In support of this thesis, they point to the mishaps and breakdowns of parliamentary government in the Islamic states, old and new, where it has been tried, including even Pakistan, where its collapse was in striking contrast with the vigorous democracy of India, another successor state of the same imperial regime.

The quest for freedom in the Middle East, as elsewhere, has been primarily and most publicly concerned with familiar and recognizable political aims: the rights of the nation against foreign overlords and, more recently, the rights of the individual against the nation and those who rule it. At the same time, there has been another, parallel quest, less discussed yet more controversial and, on the whole, rather more successful-the quest for social freedom, specifically for the enfranchisement of the disenfranchised elements in society. In principle, Islam is strongly egalitarian, and Muslim scripture and tradition explicitly reject and denounce any form of inherited social privilege. Rank and honor are to be determined by merit, piety, and personal achievement and not by descent, whether racially or socially defined. But in fact, Muslims, like others, were anxious to transmit to their children what success they had achieved, and there was thus a recurring tendency to create new elites, based on power and wealth and upheld by birth and status. The resulting social inequalities arose in spite of, not because of, Islam, and until very recent times the social barriers between classes were always less rigid and more permeable than in Christian Europe.

But while inequalities by class or status were in principle rejected, and in practice softened, by Islamic teaching, there were other inequalities that were not merely sanctioned, but were imposed and regulated by the holy law of Islam. These are the three basic inequalities: between man and woman, believer and unbeliever, and free and slave.

The struggles for the removal of these three inequalities developed along very different lines and achieved sharply contrasting results. The struggle for independence, though in part inspired by foreign ideas, arose from inside and was directed against foreign oppressors. The struggle for emancipation for all three groups of inferiors was entirely inspired, and in large measure conducted, by foreigners and was directed against an authority that was indigenous and rooted in the society.

The progress of the three emancipations was very uneven. Two causes, the granting of equal rights to followers of other religions and the abolition of the slave trade and, ultimately, of slavery, were actively promoted by the European powers, the former by the combined diplomacy of the concert of Europe and the latter by the forceful intervention of the Royal Navy. Both were helped by a growing awareness among significant groups of Muslims that these inequalities damaged the reputation of their religion and culture in the eyes of the Western world, which had only recently, and rather incompletely, renounced both and was still feeling militantly virtuous in consequence.

In earlier times, the Islamic record for religious tolerance had been considerably better than that of Christendom. But the great wars of religion that almost destroyed Europe had left a new tolerance, bred of desperation, and a new secular definition of identity, authority, and allegiance. By the nineteenth century, deviant Christians and even non-Christians in the more enlightened parts of Europe enjoyed most, though perhaps not all, the rights of citizenship, and their position was notably better than that of non-Muslims in the Muslim states, which had not changed significantly for centuries.

In any case, in a world dominated by the Christian powers of Europe, these powers found it unacceptable that Christians anywhere should be accorded an inferior status. In part because of European pressure-but at least to an equal extent because of a rising tide of liberal sentiment at home-first Turkey and then other Muslim countries enacted legislation or promulgated constitutions declaring the equality of all religious communities before the law. In practice, it did not always work out, and both Western emissaries and native Christians from time to time received sharp reminders that it was not wise to go beyond what public opinion was prepared to accept. There were times and places when the non-Muslim subjects of the Muslim states were worse off after emancipation than before. The old status given to them under Islamic law, with limited but well-established and universally recognized rights, had been abolished. The new status as equal citizens meant less and less in a situation in which citizenship itself was losing all meaning.

Islam, like every other religion and civilization known to human history, accepted slavery as a fact of life and, like Christianity and Judaism, made some attempt to lessen its asperities. Muslim scripture and tradition urge humane treatment for the slave and recommend manumission as a meritorious act. In a rule without precedent in the ancient or medieval worlds, Islam prohibited the enslavement of free Muslims and even of free non-Muslims belonging to the tolerated communities under Muslim rule. This meant that the slave population could be recruited only by birth, since the children of slaves were born slaves, or by acquisition from outside the Islamic lands, by either tribute or purchase. Since a slave population adequate to perceived needs could not, as in ancient societies, be provided from domestic resources, slaves had to imported from elsewhere. Thus, by a sad paradox, one of the great humanizing reforms brought by the advent of Islam led to an expansion of slave raiding and slave trading beyond the frontiers, in Europe, Asia, and, above all, Africa.

Slaves were sometimes used for economic purposes-for example, in mines and on plantations-but they did not constitute the principal labor force of the Islamic world. Their major employment was in a wide variety of domestic and menial purposes and also, perhaps more especially, in the home as servants, concubines, or eunuchs. The last named were needed in considerable numbers in palaces and the wealthier households and also for the maintenance and protection of sacred places.

While enjoining kindly treatment and commending manumission, Islamic law and custom provided no basis for the abolition of slavery or even for the curtailment of the slave trade. From time to time, Muslim jurists inveighed against the misdeeds of the slave traders, especially their practice, contrary to Islamic law, of enslaving free black Muslims in Africa merely because they were black. In the nineteenth century, voices are heard for the first time expressing unhappiness about the institution as such. But the main impetus for reform came from the Western powers, which intervened, often forcefully, to prevent the capture of slaves in Africa and their export to the Middle East and Asia. Legal abolition for long remained impossible in countries still formally under Islamic law, and so it was confined to the actions taken by the British, French, and later Italian empires in the territories under their authority. The Ottoman Empire, however, under the pressure of both foreign and domestic opinion, took serious steps to reduce and, as far as possible, eliminate the slave trade, which by the last decades of the Ottoman Empire survived only in those areas, like Arabia and Libya, where Ottoman control was weakest.

The formal legal abolition of slavery was enacted in most of the remaining countries of the region in the period between the First and Second World Wars, and slave laws appear to have remained in force only in the Arabian peninsula and parts of Africa. The circumstances of the Second World War and the vicissitudes of postimperial politics seem to have permitted some small revival of slave trading, but the process of legal abolition continued and was in effect completed. The last major slave-owning societies in Southwest Asia Yemen and Saudi Arabia-both abolished slavery in 1962. Mauritania, where slavery was reintroduced after the ending of French rule in 1960, formally abolished it in 1980.

Western public opinion, with the effective support of Western power, on the one hand, and an increasing body of enlightened domestic public opinion in Muslim countries, on the other, contributed significantly-indeed decisively-to the legal emancipation of the non-Muslim and of the slave. In the great days of emancipation, however, neither Western nor Muslim liberals seem to have been much concerned with the third category of legally established inferiors-women. Yet in some ways their position was the worst of the three. A slave could be, and often was, liberated; a non-Muslim, could, if he chose, embrace Islam. Manumission and conversion alike legally terminated the state of inferiority. No such option was open to the woman. Women were also vastly more numerous and more important than either slaves or infidels, and their emancipation could cause a major disruption in the whole structure of society. The movement for women's rights, when it eventually appeared, though inspired by Western ideas, was entirely Muslim in its leadership and execution.