Tag: democracy

Liberal democracy derails

Mustafa Malik June 24, 2021

LIBERAL DEMOCRACY ISN’T serving Americans very well, not, at any rate, in their well-being. Nicholas Kristoff is making the point poignantly. America’s “greatest threat,” writes the Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist, isn’t Communist China or authoritarian Russia “but our underperformance at home.”

Kristoff cites data from several surveys to support his argument. Fifteen-year-old American kids can’t do as well in math as do their peers in many in less developed countries such as Latvia, Poland and Russia. One in five of these children can’t read as well as 10-year-olds do in many other countries. Even more depressing, America is “one of only three countries, out of 163, that went backward in well-being over the last decade.”

Many Americans would, of course, still argue that they are blessed with “the world’s greatest democracy,” which is “a beckon of freedom” for the rest of the world. I travel a lot and one of my favorite haunts is Kolkata (Calcutta), India, the hub of my native Bengali culture. Two years ago, my friend Susnata Sen, who teaches history at Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata, asked me, in jest, if Trump had “lost his way to a lunatic asylum” and ended up at the White House! In 2008, in Doha, Qatar, a stringer for the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun inquired of me “how in the world did you succeed in getting W” as our president?

I told them both that democracy is “a gift of the Enlightenment,” which had derailed through the “corruption of another gift of the Enlightenment,” liberalism.

Liberalism was originally conceived as the ideology of freedom of the individual from the tyranny of monarchy and religious bigotry and prejudices. The idea was that the human mind, disabused of these strictures and prejudices, would be free to inquire rationally about the world around it, develop the sciences and technology and pursue pleasure and happiness. It sounded as a momentous idea – the greatest message to mankind since Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and Muhammad’s Farewell Sermon (in which the Islamic prophet abolished blood revenge, forbade usury, reminded men of their rights and responsibilities toward women and women’s rights over them, warned men against evil conduct, and so forth).

The one thing that was missing in the Enlightenment missive was, however, moral duty. John Locke, Voltaire or John Stuart Mill didn’t talk about men’s and women’s responsibilities to their kin and community. And that is reflected in the ideology of capitalism and free enterprise, whose corruption has been all but completed by neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, the latest twist to capitalism, calls for the elimination of price controls, deregulation of capital markets, lowering of trade barriers, etc., unleashing the forces of wanton plunder and pillage on society, regardless of the poverty, privation and hardships they visit upon the masses. It’s all about making money and pursuing individual pleasure, caring little about kin, community, humanity or its fulfillment.

In 1991 I was researching U.S. foreign policy options in Arab societies with a fellowship from the University of Chicago Middle East Center and hired a research assistant from Washington suburbs. Abdul Matin (not his real name) was a hardworking immigrant from my native India. He took a second job and got his wife to work for another family to make ends meet. They had three children, born in India and Kuwait. One of them was a toddler, and the two others helped their parents around the house besides toiling over their hard schoolwork.

At my Washington office, an American friend used to drop by for coffee and chitchat and sometimes complained about his son not doing well in school because of an under-funded school with inadequately qualified teachers in a rather depressed area in the nation’s capital.

One morning Matin showed up for work with a smile stretching from one ear to the other. He showed me his young son’s school grade released the previous day. The boy got all A’s and just one B.

I congratulated Matin. “You have a brilliant boy!” I said.

“Well,” he replied, “most of the credit goes to my daughter,” he said. Matin had told the children that education was “the most important thing” for them to do in life. Every day his daughter made sure her younger brother did his homework diligently and checked out each of his report cards. Matin’s wife wasn’t educated enough to check up on the boy’s progress in school. And the girl “reports any problem” the boy had to the parents, Natin said.

I saved a copy of the boy’s grade report and showed it to my American friend on his next visit. I told him how the family helped the Hindi-speaking boy do so well in an English-medium school.

“I just have to get serious about my kid’s school work,” he said, pensively. “He has to cut back on his Nintendo games.”

Mustafa Malik worked three decades as a journalist for American newspapers and researcher of U.S. think tanks. He now lives in Bangladesh.

India’s lesson for Lebanon

Mustafa Malik September 7, 2020

India and Pakistan could have been spared catastrophes by power-sharing systems they rejected. The Lebanese should hold on to the one they have.

I NORMALLY CAN’T stand Boris Johnson because of his demagoguery and conservative political creed. But last week Emmanuel Macron made me appreciate the British prime minister, for the first time.

The French president was in Beirut, on his second trip since last month’s massive explosion in the Lebanese capital. He warned politicians there that they had “the last chance for [their] political system,” which is based on sharing political power and interests among the country’s half a dozen religious-political factions.

The system had been introduced in Lebanon by imperial France after World War I when it created and colonized that Arab country. Macron, like many other critics of Lebanon’s consensus democracy, now says the power-sharing model has bred corruption and inertia among Lebanese officials, which somehow caused the devastating blast of a stockpile of ammonium nitrate at Beirut port.

On his first visit to the city soon after the August 4 explosion, the French president had given the Lebanese a tongue-lashing for their corruption and called for “a new political pact,” which would, he explained later, transform that country’s consensus democracy into some kind of a majoritarian one.

A democracy can be based on a consensus among groups or communities, or on the strength of a legislative majority. Under the consensus model, executive powers and legislative seats are shared by a country’s ethnic, religious or other communities, and government decisions are arrived at through dialogue among representatives of those communities. A majoritarian democracy, on the other hand, is a winner-take-all game in which a political party (or a coalition of parties), which wins a majority of seats in a parliamentary election, forms the government and enacts laws without input from minority parties of communities.

On his second trip Macron warned his Lebanese hosts that if they failed to reform their political system, he would push the international community to stop aiding Lebanon financially and sanction those among them who had amassed wealth through corruption.

I was born in India and spent part of my childhood there and then lived for years in Pakistan’s eastern province before migrating to the United States. I have been dismayed lately to see that tensions between India and Pakistan have spiked to new heights since the government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi wiped out the autonomy of the Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir state. The British had colonized the Indian subcontinent for nearly two centuries. After reading Macron’s comments on the Internet, I wondered how Indians and Pakistanis would feel if Boris Johnson were to descend on Islamabad and New Delhi and tell Modi and Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan how to settle the Kashmir issue and warn of dire consequences if they failed to follow his diktat.

I am grateful that Johnson apparently has better sense than today’s occupant of the Elysée Palace in Paris, whose forebear Henri Gouard carved out and ruled Lebanon. General Gouard had suffered two humiliating defeats at the hands of the Turks in World War I. Never mind, the French general tucked his tail between his legs and marched on Damascus, where he kicked the tomb of Salahuddin Ayyubi, the Kurdish victor over French and other European Crusaders, and thundered: “Wake up, Saladin! We are back. My presence here marks the final victory of the Cross over the Crescent!” I am afraid Macron’s current posture in Lebanon and vision about its future will prove as delusional.

The Beirut blast – which killed 181 people, wounded 6,000 others and made 300,000 homeless – pained me much as I once fell in love with that city and cherish fond memories of my three visits there. But I am nettled, really, by the attacks, mostly by Westerners, on Lebanon’s consensus system, as I believe in my bones that such a power-sharing arrangement could have spared my native Indian subcontinent two horrifying tragedies. One was the 1947 partition of British India into the modern Indian and Pakistani states, during which Hindu, Muslim and Sikh rioters massacred 800,000 souls and uprooted 14 million others from their homes and lands. The other was the dismemberment of old Pakistan in 1971 during which hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis perished in a savage Pakistani military crackdown in what was then East Pakistan.

Lebanon’s French colonial rulers who succeeded Gouard had the insights to realize that any European political model would not work in the chimera of a “nation” they had jumbled together out of Muslim and Christian sects who had never lived together in a nation-state. In cooperation with native elites, they developed a structure to provide autonomy for the country’s different sectarian communities and allow them to share executive and legislative powers. Lebanon’s political and social leaders saw the wisdom of the arrangement had it incorporated in the 1943 charter of their country’s independence from French colonial rule. Lebanon has since customized the system in response to the exigencies of the times.

Under the system, as it operates today, the president of Lebanon is to be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, the speaker of the parliament a Shiite Muslim, and the deputy prime mister and deputy speaker Eastern Orthodox Christians. The sects are also allotted parliamentary seats roughly in proportion to their population ratios.

Indian confederation

Three years after the Lebanese independence, the British colonial power in the Indian subcontinent realized that the time had come for them to pull up their stakes in that country. And like the French in Lebanon, they realized that the two major religious communities there needed a power-sharing political structure to live relatively peaceably in an independent country.

Accordingly, in the summer of 1946 a British Cabinet delegation, led by then British Secretary of State for India, Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, worked out a confederal arrangement for an independent successor state to British India. Under it the country’s provinces would be grouped into Hindu-majority and Muslim-majority ones, and those provincial groups would enjoy wide autonomy in managing their administrative, economic and social affairs. That would leave the government in New Delhi with only four subjects: foreign affairs, defense, currency and communications. The plan was initially accepted by the Indian National Congress, led by Mohandas K. Gandhi, known as the Mahatma, the great soul; and the Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Both were Oxford-educated barristers.

Gandhi’s Congress was mostly a Hindu organization whose top leaders wanted the country to run as a secular majoritarian democracy like Britain in which people would be expected to vote without regard to their religious and ethnic affiliations, and a parliamentary majority would legislate for the country and govern it through a Cabinet at its will. Jinnah, a Shiite Muslim, was actually more secular than the Hindu Gandhi. But he believed, unlike the Mahatma, that religious consciousness would dominate the minds of everyday Indian voters.

And he feared that because Hindus made up three-quarters of the British Indian population, the overwhelmingly Hindu parliament of a united democratic India would suppress Muslim interests and discriminate against Muslims unless the Muslim minority’s basic political and religious interests were safeguarded by a constitution. He proposed a list of 14 Muslim demands to be incorporated in the future constitution of India. In American parlance those demands outlined an affirmative action plan for the Muslim minority.

The Congress turned down Jinnah’s 14-point Muslim safeguards. The Muslim leader then pushed for an alternative project to preserve Muslim rights: the creation of an independent Pakistan, consisting of British India’s Muslim-majority provinces. But after the British delegation proposed a plan offering wide autonomy for the provinces, including Muslim-majority ones, Jinnah embraced the new plan for a united, confederal India.

Despite the Congress’s initial acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan, Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s chief lieutenant, had reservations about it. Anointed president of the Congress in the final year of British rule, Nehru knew, as did everyone else, that he was going to be prime minister of independent India. The last thing he wanted to do as prime minister was dabbling only with four subjects, leaving all the rest of governmental powers with groups of provinces.

On July 10, 1946, the new Congress president called a world press conference in New Delhi and went on a tangent tearing the British plan apart. An independent India would not “be bound” by any provisions of the Cabinet Mission Plan, Nehru declared, and its “sovereign parliament” would legislate and govern the country as it saw fit. Nehru found himself in alliance with his rival for the leadership of the Congress, Vallabhbhai Patel, a rabidly anti-Muslim Hindu politician.

Jinnah’s foresight

Jinnah was horrified. India was still under British rule. If the Congress president was now renouncing the plan that offered, among other things, autonomy to Muslim-majority provinces and thus the preservation of Muslim rights and interests, what would Muslims do if and when a “brute majority” of Hindus in the sovereign parliament of a united India actually enact laws and take action trampling Muslim rights? The Muslim leader withdrew his earlier acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan. He brushed aside clarifications by other Congress leaders that Nehru’s comments had been out of line with the policy of the movement because, again, who would keep a future Congress leadership or sovereign Hindu-majority parliament from scrapping the British plan? Jinnah reverted to his earlier demand for a partition of the subcontinent to create an independent Pakistan, which eventually became a reality.

I was raised by an anti-Pakistan Muslim father in northeastern India, and in my boyhood I loathed Jinnah. I came to appreciate the founder of Pakistan and his wisdom in pulling out of the Cabinet Mission Plan more than half a century later when India’s anti-Muslim Hindu nationalist groups began to rise and ultimately win successive elections through their political arm, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). BJP leader Modi was elected prime minister in 2014 and reelected to the post with an overwhelming parliamentary majority in 2019. His government has been adopting policies and getting laws passed curbing Muslim rights, allowing the lynching and widespread persecution of Muslims and stamping out the autonomy of the Muslim-majority Kashmiri state.

The Pakistan that Jinnah and the Muslim League created would fall apart 24 years later, this time because of a Pakistani ethnic community’s refusal to share powers with another. The Muslims of Bengal (along with those of the United Provinces) were in the vanguard of the Pakistan movement and in 1946 elected the only Muslim League provincial government in all of British India. But once Pakistan was created, its bureaucracy and military came under the domination of elites of Punjab province in West Pakistan. Those bureaucrats and military officers relentlessly refused to share political power with the Bengalee Muslim ethnic community, who made up more than 90 percent of the population of East Pakistan province and a majority of the entire Pakistani population. To hold on to power, the Punjabis – Punjabi elites, that is – repeatedly disrupted Pakistan’s democratic process and staged one military and military-backed coup after another. They spurned Bengalee demands for “provincial autonomy,” which, ironically, was the salient feature of the British Cabinet Mission Plan, rejected by Nehru and Patel, paving the way for the partition of old India.

By 1970, when Pakistan had its first parliamentary elections, most Bengalees in East Pakistan had been fed up with Punjabi domination, especially the dictatorship of a West Pakistan-based Punjabi military junta, led by General Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan. East Pakistan voted near-unanimously for the Awami League party, which had called for a confederation between East and West Pakistan under a 6-point plan, similar to the one proposed for a united India by the British Cabinet mission and a bit looser than the Lebanese accord of 1943.

Pakistani’s military dictatorship spurned the Awami League’s power-sharing formula, triggering a full-blown Bengalee independence movement in East Pakistan. India, Pakistan’s archenemy, seized the golden opportunity to wreck Pakistan, invaded East Pakistan and midwifed the creation of independent Bangladesh on December 16, 1971.

Two weeks earlier, on December 2, I had arrived in Beirut on a stint from the Pakistan government. Among the people I met there was Ihsan Rabah, a Ph.D. candidate from the American University of Beirut, who told me that he wanted to learn about “the civil war in your country.”

Before flying in to Beirut, I had spent a few days in Baghdad, where officials of the ruling Baath Party griped about the Kurds hatching an often-bloody independence movement in northern Iraq under their redoubtable leader Mulla Mustafa Barzani. Fayyad Alwan, a Farsi professor at Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, blamed the Kurdish movement and Sunni-Shiite cleavage in Iraq on “Muslims [being] forced to live like the English and Russians” under the Baath Party’s secular socialist laws, which had uprooted them from “the brotherhood of Islam.

While India advanced its military juggernaut toward East Pakistan, I discussed with Rabah the bloody independence struggles in East Pakistan and the Kurdish provinces of northern Iraq. He told me that he gave the French “the credit for our consociational system,” which had allowed “our [sectarian] communities to share powers and responsibilities of government” and cultivate the values of their religious communities into which they had been “rooted for centuries.” The arrangement, he added, had “enabled us live more or less peaceably” and let Lebanon “flower as a democracy,” while the people of neighboring Arab states had to endure repressive measures of ruthless kings and dictators to keep their states from breaking up.

Did I think, my friend asked, that a “consociational system like ours” could have spared Iraq and Pakistan the ethnic bloodletting that I had talked about? I did not meet Rabah again, but after the breakup of Pakistan I would have answered his question affirmatively.

The “more or less peaceable” lives of the Lebanese were subsequently shattered by a brutal sectarian civil war. More than 150,000 of them perished and 1 million were displaced during the 1975-1990 conflicts. I spent much of my 1995 visit to Beirut bemoaning the demise of the prosperous, boisterous shining city on the Mediterranean shore. Aside from Cairo, Beirut is the Arab city I have been most excited to visit. My precious memories of the city include my leisurely strolls with friends from An Nahar newspaper, and others, along Hamra Street, the so-called Champs Elysees of the Arab world, which was a hangout of Arab intellectuals, artists, visitors like me, diplomats, millionaires and billionaires. Among my favorite spots on the street were The Strand and Movenpick restaurants, where I used to dine – alone, and with friends.

Enduring, too, is my memories of evening rendezvous with friends in my room in The Lord’s hotel on the Mediterranean. On one of those evenings, I opened the window. A silence descended in the room as a heavenly scene unfolded before our eyes: gently rolling sea waves sparkling gloriously in the crimson rays of the setting sun.

All that seemed to me now to have “gone with the wind.” The city once known as the “Paris of the Middle East” had become a ghost town. Dour-faced managers watched solitary customers at Hamra Street stores. Sparse passersby plodded unhurriedly on the streets once bustled with boisterous crowds. Nearly half of the 180,000 homes and flats destroyed during the civil war were still to be rebuilt. Beirut’s population of more than 1 million had dropped to 400,000.

But just as the Americans had done more than a century earlier, the Lebanese eventually pulled together after their disastrous civil war and moved on. The religious sects already had regrouped under their modestly reformed power-sharing accord, negotiated in Taef, Saudi Arabia, and approved by the Lebanese parliament on November 4, 1989.

Successful political systems often take centuries to evolve through vicious conflicts among their religious, ethnic and political communities. The British took seven turbulent and bloody centuries to do so. In the meantime, the English and Scotts fought bloody wars; the military locked down Parliament and Parliament rose and sent the army back into the barracks; a prime minister committed regicide; and guided by bishops in the House of Lords, Parliament passed many laws denying basic rights to Catholics and nonconformists.

Democracy in America allowed, and sometimes facilitated, slavery, segregation and the lynching of African Americans. Many people don’t know how vicious were American whites’ relations with blacks and other racial categories and how long American democracy turned a blind eye to it.

‘Conservative progressives’

In 1975 my would-be wife, a bleeding-heart progressive from New Hampshire, arrived in Frederick, Maryland, to enroll in a master’s degree program at the University of Maryland at Baltimore. Patricia Susan Gawdy, 22, was aghast at seeing the statue of former Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, a native of Frederick, standing majestically in a small park in front of the city’s courthouse. In 1857 Taney had written and delivered the notorious Supreme Court decision denying American slaves’ right to flee to freedom.

Pat asked a white couple passing by why people of Frederick were “still putting up with the statue of this monster”?

“Who is a monster, young lady?” the man asked indignantly.

Pat pointed her finger at Taney’s statue.

“How dare you, girl? He is one of the heroes of our town, don’t you know?”

“Where are you from?” asked the woman.

Before she could reply, another white man, who had lumbered toward them, pointed his right index finger to Pat, and roared: “Are you a Communist?”

On March 17, 2017, a crew of three men pulled down the Taney statue with a crane at that park and loaded it onto an old Chevy pickup truck to be discarded at an undisclosed location. In the wake of nationwide protests against Confederate symbols that had been smoldering across America since 2015, the people of Frederick, where I had made my debut as an American journalist, finally decided that they had had enough of Chief Justice Taney.

My wife of 41 years was terminally ill with cancer. She read out to me a snippet from her laptop screen about the departure of the Taney statue from Frederick.

“How do you feel about it, dear?” I asked.

“These are among my better moments in life,” she said. “I think, though, that many people in Frederick still think of him as their hero.”

“What makes you think Justice Taney was a monster?”

“It’s the Roaring Sixties during which I grew up, I guess. And the progressive ghetto in which we have lived all these years.”

After a pause she added: “We remain unreconstructed progressives, don’t we? Very conservative progressives.”

My much-loving and beloved wife’s insights into life and society, and her inexhaustible generosity, sustained me during the very best years of my life.

America’s long-troubled democracy is a functioning enterprise now. Workable democracies don’t come as prefabs. They grow through trials and errors.

There are working democracies, majoritarian and power-sharing, in the West and the East. The majoritarian ones that come to mind include Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Bangladesh and Nepal, although the last two have their limitations. Among the stable consensus democracies are Sweden and the four other Nordic democracies, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Japan, and Malaysia.

Historical communities

Westerners steeped in their white-liberal political and cultural monochrome would accept any democracy as long as it has free elections and its people don’t discard it. The great German sociologist and philosopher Max Weber would find any democracy kosher as long as it is based on “popular belief in its legitimacy.” Ever since the French Revolution most Westerners, including Weber, have failed to realize the limits of such democracies in multi-religious, multi-ethnic societies outside the West.

Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and other non-Western faith groups cherish their traditional religious, ethnic, linguistic and territorial communities. Their lives and aspirations are, in many ways, fulfilled better by the heritage and cultures of those communities than their newer “imagined communities,” the term used by the Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson to describe modern nations. The moral values, lifestyles and we-they social boundaries of most peoples outside the West are shaped by their affinity with those historical communities.

Naturally, in the polling booths they usually vote for candidates who belong to and espouse communal causes and interests. Unfortunately, the values and cultures of those communities can become frigid, some quite malignant. The challenge of the coming era is going to be unfreezing those cultural rigidities and heal the malignancy of those values. Many among the non-Western elites who emerged during the late-colonial era shied away from healing the malignancy of some of those values, infecting the social and cultural norms and institutions of their societies. Instead, they got sucked up by the dominant institutions and outlook of colonizing European powers. They left the task of cultural and social reforms to religious fundamentalists, whose performance, often retrograde, is outside the scope of this article.

Beginning in the early decades of of the 20th century native leaders of European colonies plunged into struggles for their countries’ independence from European colonial rule. Many of them had a Western education. Most of these patriots fought valiantly and many suffered hardships during their struggles. They included Ahmed Sukarno of Indonesia, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk of Turkey, Riza Shah of Iran, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Mohammad Siad Barre of Somalia, Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, and Gandhi and Jinnah of British India.

In India a British education and exposure to the Western civilization apparently clouded the political vision of Mahatma Gandhi, an otherwise searingly intelligent and insightful man. He – and Nehru – failed to realize that Hindus and Muslims of their native land could not be secularized the way Western Europeans had been to work out a civic majoritarian democracy of the Westminster variety. If they had, they would have anticipated Narendra Modi, who has been elected Indian prime minister twice under its majoritarian democracy by Hindu voters, in spite of – for many of them, because of – his anti-Muslin bigotry. The Modi government has faced no effective opposition from India’s overwhelmingly Hindu society as it has launched an anti-Muslim pogrom with alarming ferocity.

No form of government can function flawlessly in any society, but social science research has preponderantly established that in multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies the consensus model is much fairer and more successful over the long haul than the majoritarian model. Arend Lijphart, a renowned political scientist who has researched democratic categories extensively, calls consensus democracies “kinder and gentler” than majoritarian ones. He says the power-sharing system promotes dialogue between ethnic and religious groups and incentivizes mutually beneficial compromises.

Consensus democracies’ proportional voting systems lead to the formation of governing coalitions that take care of the interests of a cross-section of society. They also promote close relationships between the state and interest groups and bargaining between employers and employees. All these reduce the exploitation of workers by corporations, as it is occurring in America, where more than 90 percent of the national income is piling up in the coffers of the top 1 percent of the population.

Yes, negotiations and compromises, which sometimes encounter partners’ vetoes, slow the process of governing. And assured shares of power often make leaders of constituent groups corrupt and allow them to dish out largesse among their cronies. A lot of this is happening in Lebanon, as in other democracies.

But is a quick decision, without enough reflection on its consequences, always better than a slower one made with careful deliberation among the parties it would affect? Political scientists such as Aurel Croissant of Heidelberg University in Germany argue that “democracy must grant effectiveness over representativeness.” They obviously have not carefully studied the case of Muslims living under the effectively running Modi government in India, or that of Hindu Tamils in Sri Lanka, a majoritarian democracy, where the Tamils have no agency through which to share with the Buddhist government in Colombo their torture, rape or extortion by members of the Buddhist majority.

And how valid is the argument, now being made by critics Lebanon’s consensus system, that doing away with that system would reduce political and financial corruption in government? It’s actually baseless propaganda made mostly by Europeans and Americans who think, apparently without a basis, that a majoritarian-type system would checkmate certain Lebanese factions they don’t like, especially Hezbollah, a nemesis of Israel and ally of Iran.

Studies have found that both majoritarian and consensus systems can be equally prone to corruption. Transparency International’s 2019 corruption index ranks Lebanon 137th among the 180 countries it surveyed. (The greater a country’s number on the corruption scale, the more corrupt it is assumed to be.) Here are the corruption levels in the public sectors of six of Lebanon’s neighboring majoritarian democracies, determined by Transparency. Three are more corrupt, and three less so. The three more corrupt are Bangladesh (146), Iraq (162) and Afghanistan (173). The three less corrupt are India (80), Sri Lanka (93) and Pakistan (120). So the notion that community-based power-sharing has necessarily made Lebanon more corrupt than majoritarian democracies does not hold water.

As we discussed, democratic journeys are long and arduous. But societies have to go through them to mature and stabilize. Britain and the United States endured long and scary roller coaster rides to do so. In what would have been a democratic Indian subcontinent the trip was botched up before it began. In old Pakistan it was interrupted after it had.

If and when Macron calls Michel Aoun to talk again about turning Lebanon into a majoritarian democracy, the Lebanese president should answer him with two words: Get lost.

Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington.

Mahmud Ali: Generals wrecked Pakistan

Mustafa Malik September 3, 2019

MAHMUD ALI’S BIRTH centenary on September 1 reminded me of a comment Jawaharlal Nehru made during his meeting with George Bernard Shaw in London.

Independent India’s first prime minister, a driven Fabian socialist, had been invited to attend the June 2, 1953, coronation of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey. That was “a formal occasion,” he told Shaw when the celebrated Irish playwright arrived to see Nehru at the Indian prime minister’s personal invitation, sent from Delhi nearly a month before.

‘Mahmud Ali (right), then minister of social work in Pakistan, is greeted by then Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai in Beijing in 1972.’

The more important event for him, Nehru added, was “meeting you,” the best-known ideologue of Fabian socialism. Shaw said he had been “deeply gratified” by his host’s compliment. But he asked why Nehru had said that.

“Because what I am is because of what you have written,” replied Nehru.

I’m no Jawaharlal Nehru. But I am what I am largely because of what I learned from Mahmud Ali – and Nurul Amin – during my years as a student, journalist and political activist in what used to be East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh.

I was 17 and about to graduate from high school when I first met Ali, then revenue minister of East Pakistan, at an election rally in his native Sunamganj subdivision, which is now a district (administrative regions). He was one of four visiting government ministers, and the shortest and youngest of them. They spoke at a public meeting in a rice paddy field, blanketed with crumbling stalks of harvested crops. Ali’s speech drew the most enthusiastic and sustained applause from the crowd. Their acclaim for the other speakers was lukewarm.

During his speech the revenue minister denounced the “exploitation” of peasants and workers by land owners and industrialists. And he told the audience, twice, that if he should fail to push through certain legislative initiatives to mitigate their plight, “I will leave the government and come back and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you” to continue his struggle for their “lentil and rice,” staple food for poor Bengalees.

I was impressed by Ali’s expressions of empathy for the poor, and the passion with which he made them. Faking as a restaurant worker carrying food to the ministers, I slid through a police cordon around a government bungalow in Guwainghat town in which the dignitarieswere resting after the meeting. I asked Ali a couple of questions about the anti-poverty initiatives he had talked about. He flattered me as “an intelligent young man” and asked about my family and plans for further education.

My admiration for Ali soared a few months later when I, now a college freshman, heard over the radio that he had resigned from the East Pakistan government. Mahmud Ali was the only government minister ever to resign voluntarily in the 24-year history of East Pakistan. (In 1971 that Pakistani province would emerge as independent Bangladesh.) A couple of days after Ali’s resignation I buttonholed one of his close associates in Sylhet town, from where I was attending Murarichand College.

“Do you know why Mr. Mahmud Ali has resigned,” I asked Motassir Ali.

“He was not getting anything done” that he wanted done, replied kala (black) Motassir, as he was popularly known.

I realized that Mahmud Ali was delivering on his pledge to the people of Sunamganj.

His unswerving struggle for the rights of peasants and industrial workers earned him the label of “Communist” from his right-wing political adversaries. In the 1960s, as a student of Dhaka University, I became close to him, while also moonlighting as the press aide to Amin, the leader of the opposition in the Pakistan National Assembly and a former chief minister of East Pakistan. The political circle in Sylhet came to know about my being a close associate of Ali’s. To that circle belonged my former host at a lodge from where I had attended college.

Abdullah Chowdhury asked me one day why I had become a “henchman of that Sunamganji politician.”

What was wrong with that? I inquired.

“You are the son of an alem, you should stay away from him,” replied the social conservative belonging to Sylhet’s landed aristocracy. “Mahmud Ali is always fighting rich people, people richer than his family. Do you hear him talk about Islam?”

I replied that Ali was “fighting for economic and social justice,” which was a core Islamic value but was being opposed by Muslim aristocracy.

Ali is better known, however, as a trailblazer in the struggle to restore democracy in Pakistan, abolished by the military dictatorship of Gen. Mohammad Ayub Khan. He founded and led the Ganatantri Dal (Democratic Party) and was a top leader of the National Awami Party, National Democratic Front, Pakistan Democratic Movement and Pakistan Democratic Party all of which he helped organize to achieve his seminal goal of wresting democracy back from the clutches of Pakistani generals.

He faced the most crucial decision of his turbulent political career in the wake of the movement for East Pakistan’s secession from Pakistan and reincarnation as independent Bangladesh.He just couldn’t reconcile with the idea of dismembering the country he had struggled long and onerously to help create and build.

Ali knew too well about West Pakistani political and bureaucratic elites’ neglect of economic development in East Pakistan and abolishment of democracy by the West Pakistan-based military brass – the two issues that fueled the Bangladesh movement. But he believed,and argued over and over, that the answer to those abuses of power lay in the democratization of Pakistan. East Pakistanis, 98 percent of whom are Bengalees, made up the majority of the Pakistani population, and he believed that full-fledged democracy would empower East Pakistanis and get them to end the injustices done to them. Ali, Amin, and a host of other Bengalee leaders who were in the vanguard of the Pakistan movement also feared that Bangladesh would become a satellite of India, which would border three sides of the impoverished and defenseless country.

I shared Ali’s and Amin’s political prognoses and defended and promoted them through my column in the Pakistan Observer newspaper, published in Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan. In the late 1960s Bangladeshi activists harassed and denounced Ali, kidnapped and persecuted him and bombed his house in Dhaka. (I, too, faced harassment and death threats for my writings against the breakup of old Pakistan.)

But despite those adversities and dangers, Ali never budged from his staunch support for the “unity of democratization” of Pakistan. On the eve of the birth of Bangladesh he and Amin, facing security threats in East Pakistan, moved to West Pakistan with their families. Nurul Amin served as Pakistan’s last Bangalee Prime Minister and Vice President, and Mahmud Ali as a federal minister .

Toward the end of his life Ali anguished over the “continued suppression” of Pakistani masses by the political-military-feudal elites. During my continual telephone conversations with him from the United States, he would lament the “economic plight” of everyday Pakistanis and maintain that “freedom and justice for which we have Pakistan” remained to be realized.

“Why?” I inquired of my mentor.

“Because of the power structure,” he replied.

Was it not “the same power structure,” I asked, that had disrupted democracy and sustained economic disparity between East and West Pakistan, driving that province into breaking away from Pakistan?

“You have a point,” he said, “but some politicians on both sides [East and West Pakistan] were busy exploiting the problems [instead of finding] their solutions.”

He believed to his dying day that unfettered democracy, restored in time, “would have saved [old] Pakistan.” He explained that the Ayub Khan regime should have re-established democracy in the early 1960s when the people of the two parts of Pakistan had “deep brotherly relations.” The military dictatorship of Gen. Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan held Pakistan’s first national elections in 1970, when many East Pakistanis had been “fed up with economic disparity and military rule.” That led to the “victory of the secessionists” in East Pakistan and its “rupture” with the western wing. “Military dictatorships killed Pakistan,” he added.

Ali, Amin and most other leaders of the democratic struggle in Pakistan blamed the United States for “abetting the killing of our democracy.” American administrations, Republican and Democratic, coddled each of Pakistan’s military dictators, who overthrew democratically elected governments and abrogated democratic constitutions. From the Cold War to the “war on terror, the United States has always used Pakistan to fight its strategic enemies. Never did an America administration put pressure on a Pakistani dictatorship to restore democracy.

I returned to the truncated Pakistan after the independence of Bangladesh and came away with a different take, however. I interviewed dozens of Pakistani politicians, military officers, journalists and civic society leaders about their thoughts on economic disparity between East and West Pakistan, dismissal of Bengalee-led central governments (of Prime Ministers Khwaja Nazimuddin and Hussein Shaheed Suhrawardy), the Bengalee demand for East Pakistan’s autonomy, and West Pakistani elites’ support for military dictatorships, all of which had poisoned relations between the two wings of old Pakistan. The mentality and priorities betrayed by those leading lights of Pakistani society showed that very few of them had the kind of commitment to Pakistan that Amin and Ali did. I figured that the Pakistani military and civilian leadership, centered in Punjab, wouldn’t have conceded real power to the Bengalees or allowed the establishment of real democracy, which would have done so.

As I was flying back to London from Islamabad, my mind was flashing with memories of my political activities and thinking during the pre-Bangladesh years, including what appeared now to be mymisinterpretation of events and mistaken judgments. In came rolling the last episode of Victor Hugo’s breathtaking novel Les Misérables.

Monsieur Gillenormand, the aristocratic grandfather of Marius, had bitterly opposed for years Marius’ marriage to Cosette, Jean Valjean’s adopted daughter. Valjean was a lower-class man who had served a prison term for stealing pieces of bread to feed his starving family. When Gillenormand finally realized that his aristocratic pride was destroying what would be his grandson’s lifelong pleasure and happiness, he consented to the marriage. As he was taking leave of Valjean after a glamorous wedding ceremony, Gillenormand apologized for his mistake of not approving the marriage earlier.

“Don’t most of us make mistakes most of our lives?” responded Valjean. It was better to learn of a mistake, he added, than never realize and come to grips with it.

Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts this blog.

Is Democratic Party festering in a rut?

Mustafa Malik June 28, 2019

AS I WAITED yesterday for the second Democratic presidential debate, I tossed out a question to Facebook. Could Joe Biden “get up before the referee counts to 10”? Some friends liked it, but none offered a response.

I had thought that the former vice president, so far the clear front-runner in the polls, would get a knockout punch from Bernie Sanders. The “democratic socialist” from Vermont is running second to him in the polls. I thought – and hope – that the Democratic Party has started loosening its embrace of Wall Street and social conservatives, coddled by Bill and Hillary Clinton and the now dormant Democratic Leadership Council. The Barack Obama presidency, despite Obama’s progressive rhetoric, was basically and extension of that era.

Biden did get a crushing blow during the debate. He was pummeled over his professed pride in working with racist lawmakers, opposition to school busing, insensitivity to the plight of immigrants, dillydallying on the abortion issue, vote for the Iraq war, and other right-wing positions. And CNN declared him a “direct loser” of the contest.

But it was mostly the foxy Kamala Harris, not Sanders, who gave him most of the thrashing. And most of the post-debate analysts in the news media anointed Harris winner of the encounters.

Sanders’ main problem with many Democrats has been his no-holds-barred blitzkrieg against the established, if corrupt, political and economic order and his call for a revolution to trash it. Many centrist and right-of-center Democrats have been leery about it. His push for Medicare of all, a free college education and elimination of all student debts, ending all foreign wars, and so forth, also rattle many Democrats for whom the established order is akin to religion.

Mainstream media, most of them owned by mega corporations, have been rankled by Sanders’ anti-corporate, anti-capitalist programs and rhetoric. Salon dismissed his political surge as “more about anti-Clinton sentiment than actual Bernie fever.”

On foreign policy, the mainstream media have traditionally followed the American flag, largely because of their thin grasp of foreign affairs. The late Andy Kohut of the Pew Research Center told me in 2008 that “more than 60 percent of our [Middle East] correspondents have no grounding in the dynamics of societies across the Mediterranean.”

Much of the media and many Democrats appear to be leaning toward Harris and Elizabeth Warren, who appeared in last night’s debate. These two high-energy, combative senators are progressive enough to tear the last Democratic vice president into pieces and revile the exploitative neoliberal economic establishment, while not threatening to dismantle that establishment. Harris is also popular with pro-Israeli Democrats, a substantial chunk of the party, because of her Jewish husband and hobnobbing with Benjamin Netanyahu and other right-wing Israeli politicians.

The primaries are a barometer of the Democratic Party’s center of gravity. I will be watching them to see how much of the party has broken loose of its corporate, right-wing tether. Are enough of them ready to jump into Sanders’ revolutionary bandwagon? Would they settle, instead, for a more conventional but still progressive candidate like Harris or Warren? Or do too many of them remain too invested in the Clintons-Wall Street economic order to abandon Biden, who seems to be running for a third term for Obama?

Last night’s was just the first of six primary debates that the Democratic National Committee plans for the party’s presidential candidates, the sixth is scheduled for December. We probably won’t know until the new year whether the bulk of party has moved past the Clinton-Obama era or is still staggering in a rut.

-Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts this blog.

Modi, Bibi, Trump & liberal order

Mustafa Malik April 12, 2019

Narendra Modi was the first foreign leader to congratulate Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday on his reelection as Israeli prime minister. India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister has been one of the closest allies of the Israel’s right-wing racially inspired one.

Roger Cohen, a New York Times columnist, has offered a piece of good news to Donald Trump, the racially motivated American president. Trump, too, is going to win re-election next year, “absent some decisive factor to upend the logic of it,” Cohen predicted. What’s the logic behind Netanyahu’s re-election and Trump’s anticipated one? They both have succeeded in putting together a “structural majority of the right,” composed of religious and racial groups.

What’s the logic behind Netanyahu’s re-election and Trump’s anticipated one? They both have succeeded in putting together a “structural majority of the right,” composed of religious and racial groups.

Cohen’s piece reminded me of John Mearsheimer’s latest book, The Great Delusion, which I finished reading last week. The international relations scholar says America’s “liberal hegemony” in the world is about to end partly because liberalism is failing. Liberalism, the ideology of the Enlightenment, wanted rational individuals to build peaceable, humanist societies around the world. Protagonists of the ideology believed that people’s religious and ethnic prejudices had kept them from building such societies and hence these thinkers wanted men’s and women’s affiliations with religious and ethnic systems replaced by their allegiance to institutions of liberal states, which would uphold the liberty and promote good life.

Mearsheimer says individuals “using their critical faculties, reach different conclusions about what constitutes the good life.” This has happened because Enlightenment philosophers ignored the fact that cultural systems, created through living in communities, “shaped how individuals think and behave.” If we follow the political scientist’s logic, liberalism is failing because it failed to recognize people’s affinity with religion, race and ethnicity, which have produced Netanyahu, Trump and Modi. Well, Mearsheimer is kind of echoing the thinking of a host of powerful minds from Isiah Berlin to Reinhold Niebuhr to our own Martha Nussbaum.

Mearsheimer says, correctly, that Americans’ commitment to liberalism has always been “flexible.” Religion never really left the American public square. Neither has race, as shown by the malignant episodes of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation and now Trump’s and Stephen Miller’s crusade against Hispanic immigration. Would Trump have been so obsessed with building a wall along the Mexican border if the immigrants from the south were whites from Britain, France or Germany?

The case is not fundamentally different in Europe. Western and Northern Europe have, of course, succeeded in banishing religion from public and private spheres. But racism? It lay dormant for several decades after the Holocaust and has now revived with a vengeance. My direct encounter with European racism occurred during 1998-1999, when I was researching the outlook for Turkey’s accession to the European Union as a fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. My inquiries about the issue drew negative responses throughout the five EU countries in which I conducted the fieldwork. In France, Germany and Austria – part of the white cultural monochrome (with largely suppressed Muslim subcultures) – discrepancies in “cultural” and “democratic” institutions were cited as the main reasons Turkey wouldn’t fit into the EU. In Britain and the Netherlands, avowedly “pluralist” democracies, I was told that Turkey’s relatively poor economic performance and also “slow progress” toward a full-fledged democracy would “create problems” if Ankara were to join the bloc. These were the general lines of feedback from my unscientific samples, with exceptions, of course.

In reality, Turkey has outpaced the economic performance some of the countries that have joined the Union since, e.g. Slovenia, Croatia and Lithuania. Its democratic evolution, with the inevitable blips of an emerging democracy, is more striking than that of some of the bloc’s latest members, especially the post-Communist ones. Poland and Hungary are virtual autocracies. Yet Turkey’s chances of accession to the EU is more remote today than was two decades ago when I investigated the question.

Turkophobia of the “white-Christian club,” as the former Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu once described the EU to me, dates back to Ottoman Turks’ conquest southeastern Europe and march to the gates of Vienna in 1529 and 1683. Race and culture, informed by the values of Western Christianity, remain a stumbling block to the bloc’s acceptance of brown-skinned Muslim Turks’ membership application. Racism in Europe has reached the highest levels since the Holocaust mainly because of an influx of Muslim immigrants with different shades of brown skin tones. Muslims make up 6 percent of the European population. Islamophobia is but a new incarnation of anti-Semitism, which raged in Europe for many centuries.

Britain, viewed as a model of racial and religious tolerance, is a case in point. In no other Western country would you see so many brown Muslims and black Caribbeans serving proudly in public offices from the government ministry to Parliament to city councils. Much of it, however, reflects the traditionally pragmatic Britons’ acceptance of the demographic reality. Non-whites make up 13 percent of the British population of 64 million. Actually, race consciousness remains endemic to British psyche and has been heightened by the growth of non-white communities. Polls have shown that fear of Muslim immigration has been a key driver of the Brexit campaign. One poll put out last November by The Independent newspaper found that 31 percent of white Britons feared that “Muslim immigration is part of a bigger plan to make Muslims a majority of this country’s population.”

If race is eating away at liberalism in Europe, religion and ethnicity have kept it from taking root in most of the rest of the world. The concepts of church-state separation and rights of the rugged individual are among the basic principles of liberalism. But these ideas have been alien to Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Pashtun, Palestinian, Kurdish, Balinese, Hutu, Tuareg, Mulatto, and Zambo communities. Many people in these religious and ethnic groups would sacrifice their individual well-being, and sometimes lives, for communal solidarity and interests.

We need a new world order that safeguards the cultural, economic and political interests of autonomous religious and ethnic communities. Netanyahu must be barred from continuing to dispossess and subjugate the Palestinians, Modi from suppressing the freedoms of Kashmiri and other Indian Muslims, and Trump from trampling the rights of Hispanic immigrants and would-be immigrants at the Mexican border. An American citizen, I am voting for Bernie Sanders who, as president, would promote these cherished aspirations of mine, along with others.

Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts this blog.

Turks, EU: Never the twain meet?

Mustafa Malik May 17, 2017

IS TURKEY FINALLY waking up from its dream of joining the European Union?

During the past six weeks EU politicians excoriated President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on his victory in a Turkish constitutional referendum, which transforms the country’s parliamentary system into a presidential one, concentrating wide powers in the presidency. The constitutional changes go into effect after the 2019 Turkish general elections, and if Erdogan is re-elected, he’d become a powerful “executive president.” These Europeans, and many Turks, see that making him an “authoritarian” ruler. Some of them demanded and end to negotiations on Turkey’s accession to the EU. Others argued that Turkey would be unable to adopt “European values,” which EU members are required to observe. Those values include democracy, the rule of law, human rights and minority rights.

In response, Erdogan threatened to hold a new “Brexit-like referendum,” asking the Turks if they wanted to join the European bloc at all. Over the years many Turks have been turned off by what they consider a discriminatory stance of a “Christian club” toward their Muslim nation. A poll taken in 2014 found that only 28 percent of Turks viewed EU membership as “a good thing,” compared to more than two-thirds of them who did so in the 1990s and early 2000s.

At any rate, tempers have cooled lately among politicians on both sides. Never mind, says the EU foreign policy chief. Federica Mogherini has announced that the talks on the the 30-year-old Turkish membership application would continue. “It is not suspended,” she insisted. “It hasn’t ended.” And last week Omer Celik, Turkey’s EU affairs minister, confirmed her announcement. He said “there is no question” of breaking off those talks.

I have been predicting, though, that Turkey would never join the European bloc, not as a full member, anyway. I came to this conclusion nearly two decades ago, and nothing has happened since to change my opinion. During 1998-1999 I was conducting fieldwork in Europe and Turkey on how a Turkish Islamic surge would affect Ankara’s bid to join the European bloc. I had a fellowship with the German Marshall Fund of the United States to do the project.

On August 2, 1998, at the end of a long interview with Erdogan, then disgraced mayor of Istanbul, he asked what I had learned about Europeans’ attitudes toward Turkey’s EU membership. I told him that “I’d be surprised” if his country would ever become a “full member” of the bloc. The mayor didn’t seem to be convinced. Four months before, he had been convicted by a State Security Court for reciting an Islamic poem at a public meeting, which the judges said had incited “hatred based on religious difference.” Turkey was then a radically secular state and Erdogan had been known as a gung-ho activist of the Islamist Welfare Party. I interviewed him when he was packing to vacate the mayor’s office and await an anticipated jail sentence from the State Security Court. He told me that he would be working to have Turkey “join the [European] Union.”

Contrary to what I had heard about him, Erdogan disputed my characterization of him as an “Islamist” and asserted twice that he believed that the Turkish government should be “secular,” and that religion should be a “private matter.” He was no more an Islamist than Helmut Kohl was a Christian fundamentalist, he said. Kohl was then chancellor of Germany, belonging to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). I’d learn later that Erdogan, Parliament members Abdullah Gul (later president) and Bulent Arinc (later speaker of Parliament) and a number of other former Welfare Party activists were about to leave the Islamist movement and form a conservative Muslim party. Polls had shown that two out of three Turkish Muslims, religious as they were, had been leery about Islamism.

Soon after his newly formed Justice and Development Party, or AKP, won the 2002 parliamentary elections, Erdogan set out for a whirlwind trip through Europe, pushing the Turkish accession case to EU governments and elites. The Turkish leader reiterated to them that he was a “secular” politician who had no intention of setting up an Islamist government. And he began making continual visits to the United States (Yesterday was his 13^th visit to the White House), meeting government officials and intellectuals, including some neoconservatives, and trying to dispel the notion that he or the AKP had an Islamist agenda. He also talked about his pursuit of Turkey’s EU membership.

ACCESSION TALKS

On December 10, 2002, the day before his first visit to the White House to meet then President George W. Bush, Erdogan told me in Washington that he would be asking the U.S. president to “say a good word” to EU leaders about the Turkish case. Bush did just that, and in December 2005 the EU began Turkish accession talks. I read news reports about some Turkish politicians were optimistic about their finally joining the Europeans, which had been a consuming mission of the nation’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

I still didn’t expect to see Muslim Turks showing up in Brussels to join discussions about the policies and priorities of the bloc. I didn’t think “democratic deficit” and “poor human rights record” were the real sources of the EU’s angst about Turkish accession, even though these shortcoming were routinely mentioned as Turkey’s disqualification for bloc membership.

If you have European friends or observed Europeans’ attitudes toward the Turks closely, you’d know what dismays them most about having Turks in Europe. Julius Ray Behr, an architect in Berlin, was quite candid to me about it. During a 2000 trip I asked him about his take on the Turks’ efforts to join the EU. Were they trying achieve “in Brussels what they could not accomplish in Vienna”? he replied, laughing. He was referring to the Ottoman army’s 1683 attack on Vienna, which was repulsed by the city’s Austrian and Polish defenders, putting an end to the Ottoman Empire’s thrust toward Western Europe. A burly, graying man in his late 50s or early 60s, Behr suggested that if the Turks, then about 60 million, were allowed to join the bloc, they would mess up Europe’s “social and cultural life,” infusing Islam into it.

I heard the argument before and since. Since the Dark Ages, Continental Europe has been a white racial monochrome, and Europeans violently resisted the presence of other racial and cultural strains in their midst. Beginning in the late 15^th century, Jews and Muslims, who had lived in Europe for centuries, suffered waves after waves of slaughter, forced conversion to Christianity and expulsion from the Continent. Most of those Jewish and Muslim refugees were welcomed with open arms in Muslim Turkey and Levant. In pre-Enlightenment Europe, Jews were detested as “Christ killers” and Muslims as heathens. Post-Enlightenment, they were scorned as inferior races. The Holocaust was the final episode of whitening Europe’s social and cultural texture.

Erdogan, as I observed him, is a passionate, willful man, who isn’t quite acculturated to Western democratic institutions and practices. He’s not very tolerant of dissent as would be, for example, Angela Merkel or Emmanuel Macron. Erdogan and his government say, however, that the current political and social turmoil has been spawned by the old ultra-secular Kemalists establishment. Kemalists are follower of Kemal Ataturk’s laicist, anti-Islamic ideology, who have been campaigning for the secularization and Europeanization of Turkish society and culture. Having been roundly defeated in successive elections, many of them have made common cause with Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, who has been trying to topple the AKP government through undemocratic means. In 1999 Turkish intelligence found Gulen colluding with his associates to destabilize the then secular government in Ankara, and the cleric dashed into exile in the United States to evade arrest and prosecution.

Gulen has, or had, an extensive network of followers in Turkish police, judiciary and military. The military, the self-appointed “guardian” of Kemalism, continually overthrew democratically elected governments until the AKP came to power in 2002. The military brass, Kemalists and Gulenists have had a hard time accepting the AKP government, despite it being elected democratically. In 2007 the army high command issued a threatening memorandum opposing the election of Abdullah Gul as president, arguing that the headscarf worn by his wife, Heyrunnisa, would violate the secularist tradition of the presidential palace. The Kemalist opposition in the parliament, which used to elect presidents, also decided to boycott the vote. The AKP responded with a snap election, which it won handily, neutralizing military-Kemalist resistance to Gul’s election as president.

CRACKDOWN ON DISSENT

The next year Kemalist prosecutors sued the AKP in the Constitutional Court, demanding the party be banned because it had become a “center of anti-secular activities.” The Constitutional Court had, at the bidding of the army and Kemalist elites, outlawed five political parties one after another. This time, though, the AKP survived because only six judges, instead of the required seven, supported the motion to ban it. This was followed by other Kemalist and Gulenist court cases against Erdogan government. The abortive military coup last July, which the government says was masterminded by Gulen, was the latest attempt so far to overthrow the Erdogan government.

Reacting to these subversive actions, especially the failed coup, the AKP regime launched a widespread crackdown on Gulenist and Kemalist dissidents. It has jailed thousands of political dissidents and fired thousands of others from their jobs in the police, judiciary, bureaucracy and military. Several media outlets have been shut down, and scores of journalists thrown behind the bar. Many Kemalists and Gulenists obviously have supported or joined destabilizing activities or the abortive coup. But many innocent citizens appear also to have been caught up in the fray and lost their jobs or suffered detention or prison terms. Given the mounting opposition to Erdogan and his government, I won’t be surprised to see them defeated in the next or a subsequent election.

But Erdogan and the AKP will be remembered for ending the 90-year-long military and Kemalist pseudo-autocracy in Turkey and ushering in full-fledged, or nearly so, democracy. In one bold move after another the Erdogan government purged the military of many of its coup-mongering officers; reformed the military-dominated National Security Council, bringing it under civilian control; stripped the Constitutional Court of its power to ban political parties; disbanded the clandestine West Study Group (BGG), a cell within the army, which collected intelligence on politicians and planned coups; expanded freedom of the press and expression; introduced a new Penal Code, abolishing torture by police and security personnel; guaranteed individual rights, which was subordinated to the demand of whatever law-enforcement agencies decided was the “security of the state”; restored the use of the Kurdish language and celebration of Kurdish symbols cultural events, banned since the founding of the state; and so on.

The government has rolled back many of the democratic reforms it carried out. I expect these lapses to be remedied by this regime or its successors. I don’t believe that the Turks, having tasted the blessings of freedom and democracy, will revert to the Kemalist era again. They demonstrated their new, indomitable spirit of freedom during the coup attempt last July when everyday Turks, responding to Erdogan’s televised call, poured into the streets of Istanbul and Ankara, braved military bombs and bullets, chased and assaulted rebel troops and crushed the uprising in hours. That was the first time in history the Turks challenged and quashed a military putsch.

DEMOCRACY’S BIRTH PANGS

Formative phases of most democracies – including the United States, Britain, France and Germany – have always been marked by similar and more dire mayhem: civil wars, ethnic and religious strife, and authoritarian governance. Some of the newer democracies within the EU are also going through their birth pangs. Look at the post-Communist democracies of Hungary and Poland. Freedom House has lamented a “spectacular breakdown of democracy” in the two countries, and human rights watchdogs and media pundits have denounced their “autocratic” governments. Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban has all but silenced political dissent through continual crackdowns, suppressed press freedom, persecuted his opponents, and proudly declared Hungary an “illiberal state.” He says Western European “liberal values today incorporate corruption, sex and violence.” Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the chairman of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS), has passed laws flouting parliamentary rules, weakened the country’s highest court, stifled the press, appointed loyalists to civil service and government-run media organizations. He has turned the public television broadcaster TVP into a PiS party station. (Critics call it TVPiS!). PiS has gerrymandered electoral districts to ensure the victory of its candidates. And so on.The problem is that both Orban and Kaczynski continue to win elections, the former has a two-thirds majority in the Hungarian parliament. European politicians and news media continue to criticize their autocratic rule. Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, met Orban at the EU’s Riga summit and greeted him: “Hello dictator!”

Yet few Europeans are calling for Hungary’s or Poland’s expulsion from the EU, just as few would like to have the Turks in the bloc. Ask a Turk why, and he or she would tell you that Poles and Hungarians have the right faith and skin tone, and more of less blend in the cultural monochrome that Europe has been for the past two millennia. Turkey, with its Muslim population of 90 million, would rupture that cultural harmony. Echoing the German architect Behr, Remy Leveau, a political science professor at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Institute of Political Studies of Paris), told me the “real problem” hindering Turkish membership of the EU. “We [Europeans] don’t have a history of cultural pluralism.” I was chatting with him at his office on Rue Michel-Ange in Paris on the gloomy afternoon of November 2, 2000. Even though Europeans were secular, he said, “we observed All Saints Day yesterday,” and “Christian values” underpinned “our moral standards and worldviews.” Having Muslim Turks in European neighborhoods wouldn’t “help social cohesion,” he added.

All the same, Turkey remains an asset to Europe and America, having the second-largest armed forces in NATO and serving as a bulwark against anti-Western guerrilla and terrorist forces in the Middle East. Turkey, too, is the EU’s fourth-largest export market and fifth-largest supplier of imports.

Today, under an agreement with the EU, Turkey hosts 3 million refugees from the Middle East and South Asia, who would otherwise be flooding Western Europe, creating a demographic and security nightmare there.

Hence Mogherini wouldn’t suspend, let alone end, Turkey’s “accession” talks, even though she knows the Turks wouldn’t be joining the family of European nations. I can foresee the eventual outcome of the negotiations: The Turks won’t become Europeans, but would maintain special economic and security relations with Europe.

The Erdogan government knows this. As a result, it’s already cultivating strategic and trade relations with Russia, China, India, Pakistan and a host of Middle Eastern countries.

Mustafa Malik, an international affairs analyst in Washington, has researched EU-Turkish relations and U.S. foreign policy options in the Middle West and South Asia. He hosts the blog ‘Muslim Journey’: https://muslimjourney.com.

Erdogan’s hello to Egyptians

Mustafa Malik July 16, 2016

THAT WAS A second in Turkish history. Democratic forces, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, overwhelmed Turkish military units that had attempted to overthrow the country’s democratically elected government.

It was a spectacular triumph for Erdogan, and more to the point, the democratic fervor and aspirations of the Turkish masses.

The first time Erdogan and the Turks foiled a military plot to overthrow their civilian government was in 2012, when the government of then Prime Minister Erdogan roped up hundreds of coup mongering military officers and soldiers, 322 of whom were sent to prison after lengthy trials. Since 1960 the power hungry Turkish military had overthrown four democratically governments.

During and after yesterday’s abortive military uprising, the Erdogan government arrested more than 2,800 military personnel, suspected of participating in what the president termed “an act of treason.” He vowed that the plotters would “pay a heavy price.”

I have known Erdogan for a while and am familiar with his commitment to democracy. He’s a single-minded man. He can be impulsive, too. But don’t get worked up by “authoritarian” and “autocratic” labels put on him by his detractors in Turkey and abroad. Most of them have been raving about his Islamic political background right from the beginning. They abound in the American media and political circles. These Americans have forgotten about slavery, the disenfranchisement of women, Jim Crow, and the enduring racism – all of which coexisted with the democratic process. Erdogan may be an imperfect practitioner the democratic art, but he’s the father of full-fledged democracy in Turkey, founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, an autocrat.

Erdogan impressed me with his commitment to true democracy during my first interview with him nearly two decades ago. A journalism fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, I had been on a research trip through Western Europe and Turkey to assess the spread of Islamism among Turks and its possible impact on Ankara’s bid for accession to the European Union.

Then mayor of Istanbul, Erdogan had been convicted by a secularist court for reciting a poem at a public meeting that the judges said could have incited religious hatred. Intriguingly, the poem had been composed by an agnostic sociologist who was also a protagonist of secular Turkish nationalism. Zia Gokalp’s poem, entitled “Soldier’s Prayer,” likened Turks to Islamic soldiers, mosques to their military barracks and minarets to their swords.

Following Erdogan’s conviction, the ultra-secularist government of the day sacked him from his job as mayor. On August 2, 1998, when I arrived to interview him in Istanbul, the disgraced mayor was packing to vacate the mayor’s office. Apparently because of his belief that his political career would survive the conviction and a subsequent prison term, he showed a keen interest in Turkey’s accession to the EU.

He was eager to know what my interlocutors in France, Germany and Belgium had said about Turkey’s EU membership.

“Do they want us in,” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Some of them said they were concerned about your military’s grip on your democratic process.”

“I share their concern. We, our party [the Islamist Virtue Party], have been the worst victims of military coups.”

The previous year the army, which considered itself the guardian of Turkish secularism, had thrown out the democratically elected government of the Islamist Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, Erdogan’s mentor. The generals accused Erbakan of posing a threat to the country’s secular political system.

Most EU officials, I said, wanted to see Turkey “a real democracy before they take a serious look at your membership application.”

“We want Turkey to be a full democracy. That’s one of the reasons we want to join the European bloc. That would help us secure democracy.”

I have since watched him, as prime minister and president, replace Turkey’s military-supervised, elitist political system with a full-blown democracy, as it can be in the ethnic contexts of the Turks and Kurds and their Islamic tradition. I’ve watched him reiterate his commitment to democracy over and over.

Yesterday I remembered Erdogan’s democratization campaign as I watched crowds pouring into the streets and squares of Ankara and Istanbul, facing down the rebellious troops and their tanks and rolling back their short-lived rebellion. And I was wondering why Egyptians couldn’t do the same thing in July 2013, when a military junta overthrew the democratically elected Islamist government of President Mohammed Mursi. Why couldn’t Egyptian crowds chase Gen. Abdul Fattah al-Sisis’s forces back into the barracks? Al-Sisi and his troops probably were more brutal than Turkey’s rebel soldiers and officers. They have mowed down hundreds of protesters, imprisoned and hanged hundreds of others and unleashed a reign of terror in Egypt.

My take on it is that unlike in Turkey, democratic consciousness and aspirations in Egypt have yet to jell among the public. In their 7,000-year history, Egyptians had never known elections and democracy until 2012, when Mursi was elected president and his fellow Islamists won a parliamentary majority. The Turks, on the other hand, have been having elections and nurturing a multi-party democratic process, albeit with occasional military interruptions, for some six decades now.

Democracy never takes root in a society in one smooth push. It’s a messy and long-tern business. The British took seven turbulent centuries to become a pro in the art. The Americans have been practicing it through slavery, a Civil War, Jim Crow and racism, whose latest manifestation has been a spate of killings of African Americans by white policemen and the slaughter of five white police officers by an African American man.

As I see it, four years ago Egyptians had a trial run of democracy. I bet the barbarity to the Sisi dictatorship is fueling a second, more determined democratic uprising in Egypt. A more enduring Arab Spring.

Mustafa Malik, an international commentator in Washington, hosts the blog: Muslim Journey (https://muslimjourney.com).

Terror bred by grievances, not Islam

Mustafa Malik February 21, 2015

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S speech at this week’s terrorism conference in the White House sounded to me like a broken record from the George W. Bush administration. Bush and his advisers attributed Muslim terrorism to Islam.

“Islam is a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for him,” said John Ashcroft, Bush’s attorney general. “Christianity is a faith where God sent his son to die for you.”

President Obama, too, believes that Islam is a major source of Muslim terrorism. His aides have lined up a group of Muslim clerics, activists and governments to present a “moderate” interpretation of Islam to their fellow Muslims. But unlike his Republican predecessor, Obama is more sensitive about the sentiments of mainstream Muslims, who resent linking their religion to heinous acts like terrorism. Hence he camouflaged his reference to Islam with the phrase “distorted ideology.”

The Muslim “religion,” in the sense religion is understood in the West, has little to do with terrorism. I tried to explain in my last segment that Islam, unlike Western Christianity, doesn’t segregate a Caesar’s domain from God’s. All Muslim domains, private and public, belong to God. In practical terms, the Muslim public sphere is suffused with Islamic values and social outlook.

Of late that the Muslim public sphere has all but submerged under waves of anti-American and anti-Western sentiments. Surveys after surveys have shown that between 72% and 94% of populations in Muslim countries are hostile or antipathetic to America. Their antipathy derives mainly from U.S. foreign and defense policies toward Muslim societies.

Muslim societies are modernizing fast, while becoming more and more attached to Islamic values and Islamic cultural patterns. They’re more concerned about Islamic causes and the global Muslim community.

Obama’s attribution of Muslim terrorism showed his gross misunderstanding of Islam as well as the motives that propel some Muslims into acts of violence. The president came into office with very little grounding in international affairs, and has stuffed his administration with holdovers from the Bush and Bill Clinton administrations. He is, unfortunately but unsurprisingly, getting the same kind of off-the-wall, jingoist advice that doomed both previous administrations’ Muslim world policies.

Islam, as I said, is a both a private- and public-sphere religion. These days most Muslims are channeling their grievances against America or their own governments in the public sphere through the democratic process. They’re engaged in democratic movements and, when permitted, pushing their agendas through the electoral process. It signals a dramatic and healthy evolution of these movements since the late 1960s and early 1970s, when their watchword was “Islamic revolution.” Those days some of my Islamist acquaintances in Pakistan and Bangladesh espoused armed struggle against the “enemies of Islam” at home and abroad.

Among them is Motiur Rahman Nizami, the head of the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami party in Bangladesh, now on the death row for his alleged involvement in the killing of Bangladeshi independence activists in 1971. I met him in 2003 after the Jamaat had won the second-largest number of seats in a Bangladeshi parliamentary election, catapulting him to the post of industries minister.

His sparsely furnished office was tucked away in the Motijheel business district in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital.

Did the Jamaat “still believed in armed struggle?” I asked.

He smiled, and instead of answering my question directly, he said, “Democracy is the best tool for us to spread the message of Islam.”

Because Islamic spirit and values are spreading quite rapidly in most Muslim countries, mainstream Islamists everywhere have come to believe that they no longer need violent methods to pursue their Islamization agenda. They’re avidly participating in democratic activism.

A second group of Islamists, known as terrorists, continue armed struggle to achieve their goals. They’re generally focused on resisting occupation and aggression by armed opponents. They include Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad in Kashmir, Riadus Salikin and the Islamic International Brigade in Chechnya, the ETIM in China’s Xinjiang province, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the Levant, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Chad and Niger, and so on. All these terrorist groups see themselves fighting to liberate their peoples from foreign occupation or defend them against domestic persecution.

Obama was talking, specifically, about the Islamic State terrorism in Syria and Iraq. The IS emerged to defend Iraq’s Sunni Arabs, who suffered horrible persecution and ethnic cleansing from the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Iraqi Shiite governments and Shiite militias and the Bashar al-Assad government in Syria. As many other terrorist groups do, the IS also has engaged in gruesome slaughter and brutal persecution of innocent civilians. The world shouldn’t tolerate such crimes.

The fact remains, however, that these terrorist groups have been fighting for political, not religious, causes. They’re inspired or instigated by political and social grievances, not by the Quran or some “distorted ideology” based on it. Whether their causes or methods of operation are justified (Nobody would justify the slaughter of innocent people), is another matter.

Cow, crescent and star

Mustafa Malik December 6, 2014

Published in Middle East Policy, Washington, D.C.; December 5, 2014

Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, is investigating the impact of Hindu nationalism on liberal values and democratic institutions in his native India. Earlier, he conducted fieldwork on religious movements and nationalist experiments in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent as a fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the University of Chicago Middle East Center.

LAST MONTH President Obama accepted India’s invitation to be the chief guest at its Republic Day celebrations. He will be the first American president to do so.

I was in Kolkata (Calcutta), India’s “cultural capital” when this was announced. Most of my interlocutors there were euphoric about the news, especially the supporters of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatya Janata Party (BJP). Narendra Modi, the BJP leader and prime minister, had invited the American president to the January 26, 2015, events. On that date 67 years ago, newly independent India adopted its democratic constitution.

Most Hindu nationalists in India viewed Obama’s gesture as America’s acceptance of Hindu nationalism. I saw it as the president’s doing business with a democratically elected government that happens to be Hindu nationalist. Two years ago, the Obama administration embraced the Islamist government of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, who had come to power through a free and fair election. The Morsi government has since been overthrown in a military coup, and Morsi languishes in jail.

Nevertheless, secularists and liberals in the West who throw a fit on hearing the word “religious fundamentalist” or “militant” might consider following Obama’s lead on the issue. Not that we should approve of religious militants’ violence or other destructive conduct, if they engage in it. However, we need to understand the sources of their militancy and encourage their evolution into more peaceable social or political categories, and participation in the democratic process is one of the best roads to that goal. So far, though, bombing Muslim militants has been America’s and NATO’s preferred method of dealing with them, it has served only to multiply them and bolster their capabilities.

Today religious values and ethos permeate most postcolonial societies, whether Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist or others. Unfortunately, the religious upsurge also has ratcheted up interfaith hostility in many countries. The BJP is a glaring example. The party and allied Hindu nationalist organizations plan to change India’s traditionally multi-cultural society into one based on Hindu religious and cultural values. They have come a long way toward that goal, but their march has been accompanied by widespread discrimination and violence against Muslims, India’s largest religious minority, numbering around 160 million people.

Modi has long been in the vanguard of the movement to Hinduize Indian society. He was banned from visiting the United States for nearly a decade for his alleged connivance in the horrific anti-Muslim riots of 2002. Nearly 2,000 Muslim men, women and children were hacked, beaten and burned to death by Hindu mobs. The all-important question haunting many Indian minds, including mine, is whether these faith-based communal conflicts will abate. And if they do, how?

I disagree with those who fear that the new wave of religious resurgence, especially among Muslims, might lead to the kind of sectarian or interfaith bloodbaths that ravaged Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some historical records show that 35 percent of the population perished in those waves of intra-Christian militancy. But these are different times. Thanks to the spread of the Enlightenment values of freedom, tolerance and humanism, people around the world are increasingly getting used to divergent ideologies, religions and cultures. Everyday people in most countries are more tolerant of the religious or ethnic Other than they were 50 years ago.

The growing acceptance of the Other has been facilitated by globalization and the 24/7 electronic and digital interaction across countries and continents. Of course, most diehard liberals (Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls them “liberal fundamentalists”) and religious militants have yet to feel the winds of pluralism and contestation with discrepant ideologies, faiths and communities. I also do not rule out further aggravation of Muslim hostility by the military aggression and political and diplomatic tutelage America and its allies are using around the Muslim world. But I see this approach running its course before too long, as its futility and backlash begin to dawn on its practitioners.

Meanwhile, there has been a growing search among intellectuals, the media and others for the sources of the what is commonly known as religious militancy and violence. A host of sociologists and social scientists has concluded that the religious pull being felt by people in postcolonial societies stems, in large measure, from their quest for dignity and authenticity. This is also fostered by their pervasive exposure to Western ideas of freedom and selfhood. Modernity’s corrosive effects on societies are another source of religious upsurge. “Modern societies,” says Daniele Hervieu-Leger, a leading French sociologist, “may corrode their traditional religious base; at one and the same time, however, these societies open up new spaces and sectors that only religion can fill.”

Postcolonial societies aren’t generally receptive to the liberal tools of mediation, elections and so on, to settle what they see as existential issues: foreign domination, preservation of religious and cultural values, and basic communal interests. Many Western societies have no qualms about waging war over lesser questions.

Liberalism, is a uniquely Western ideology; it cannot be planted holistically in most non-Western societies. The liberal concepts of church-state separation, individualism and freedom without responsibility emerged largely as reactions to anomalies in European traditions. Those include the long and bloody religious conflicts, the church-state power struggle and the sanctity of individual property rights in the Germanic tribal cultures. Societies that were unaffected by these historical trends and experiences have mostly been inhospitable to most of the liberal values that are germane to Eurocentric civilization.

Hence most of Europe’s former colonies are modernizing, while cherishing the basic aspects of their religious and other traditions. Peoples outside the West can, of course, profitably cultivate many of the useful institutions that have evolved from Western ideas, experience and endeavors. Indeed they have been enriching their lives and societies by embracing many of those ideas and institutions — democracy, the rule of law, scientific inquiry and so forth. But they’re doing so to the extent these pursuits can be adapted to their core religious and cultural norms.

The view that liberalism is a specifically Western ideology and that aspects of it will not work in many non-Western societies, is shared, to different degrees, by a growing number of sociologists, philosophers and historians. Among them are Peter Berger, David Martin, Grace Davie, Karen Armstrong, Amy Goodman, Steve Bruce, Ernest Gellner and Charles Taylor. They also include many non-Western intellectuals who are committed to liberal and leftist causes and worldview.

Susnata Das is professor of history at Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata. The leftist Hindu intellectual complained that Hindu-Muslim tensions had increased in India since the BJP had come to power in New Delhi seven months earlier. Asked about his take on the Gujarat “riots,” the professor took exception to my use of the word. We were talking in our native Bengali language. Getting excited about his viewpoint, he switched to English: “It was NOT a riot. It was pogrom.” With portraits of Vladimir Lenin, Friedrich Engels and India’s socialist icons watching us from his office walls, Das described some of the horrifying details of the Gujarat carnage. He blasted Modi and his BJP for their anti-Muslim “bigotry, pure bigotry, and hate,” which he said had unleashed recurrent Hindu violence against Muslims.

Then, scratching the back of his head, indicating a sense of resignation, my interviewee lamented that India’s once-powerful leftist and secularist movements had been “losing ground” to Hindu nationalism. That was because, he added, many Indians are “turning back to their religious and cultural traditions.” The same can be said of people in many other non-Western countries. They are forswearing many features of liberalism with which they began their journeys as citizens of independent states and substituting them for their own religious institutions and idiom.

The “Muslim homeland” of Pakistan was founded by a thoroughly secular and Anglicized Muslim statesman. He did not practice the Islamic faith, and he drank gin in the afternoon and whiskey in the evening, though drinking alcohol is strictly forbidden by Islam. In August 1947, Muhammad Ali Jinnah declared in Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly (parliament) that his new nation would guarantee complete freedom to practice any religion, but that religion would have no role in the affairs of the Pakistani state.

The father of the nation assured Pakistanis,

You are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion, caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the state.

Yet the Islamization of Pakistani society and laws began less than a decade after Jinnah’s death in 1948. It reached a peak under the government of another staunchly secular Pakistani leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. That left-leaning populist came to power as president when grassroots Islamization campaigns had spread to large swaths of Pakistan and threatened his government. In September 1972, he said to me in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, “You can’t be a democrat and secular [in Pakistan] at the same time.” I had asked him about the pressure from the Islamist political parties Jamiatul Ulama-i-Islam and Jamaat-i-Islami to enshrine the Sharia, Islamic canon law, in a constitution that was being drafted in parliament. “The National Assembly has been elected by the people,” he reminded me. “Most of our people are devout Muslims.”

I was prompted to ask for the interview with the non-practicing Muslim politician after he had made a clarion call to Pakistanis “to make this beautiful country an Islamic state, the bravest Islamic state and the most solid Islamic state.” The U.S.-educated “socialist” Zulfikar Bhutto’s new constitution declared Pakistan an “Islamic state.” It proclaimed that “all existing laws shall be brought in to conformity with the injunctions of Islam,” and that no new laws would be enacted that would be “repugnant to the injunctions of Islam.” Later, as prime minister, Zulfikar Bhutto endorsed other measures, excluding the Ahmadiya sect from the traditional Islamic mainstream; changing the weekly holiday from Sunday to Friday, the Islamic Sabbath; and taking other measures, all of which turned Jinnah’s secular Pakistan into an Islamic state.

Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Tunisia and most other postcolonial Muslim states also founded their political structures on liberal — sometimes socialist — models. Today most of them have reworked those models to accommodate Islamic tenets and code of conduct. Some Muslim states continue to maintain formally secular political systems, mostly for Western consumption. But Islam pulsates in the life of their Muslim citizens. This category of Muslim states includes Indonesia, Bangladesh, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Mali, Senegal, Djibouti and Gambia.

Hindu or Muslim societies aren’t the only ones facing a religious upsurge in their once-secular public space. The world’s only Jewish state was founded as a fiercely secular polity. In its declaration of independence in 1948, Israel announced that it “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights” and “guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture to all citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex.” These principles formed the bedrock of Israel’s Basic Law.

Beginning in the late 1970s, however, the ultra-orthodox and orthodox branches of Judaism began to Judaize Israeli politics and culture, gradually reducing Palestinians and other non-Jews to second-class citizens. The racial and religious apartheid that became pronounced under Prime Minister Menachem Begin has culminated in the policies of the Benjamin Netanyahu government.

Despite the state-sponsored discrimination and suppression of Israeli Palestinians, however, the state’s Basic Law still recognizes the equality of all Israeli citizens, regardless of religion or ethnicity. In a widely cited ruling, former Israeli Supreme Court President Aharon Barak articulated the state’s doctrine of equality. “It is true,” he wrote, “members of the Jewish nation were granted a special key to enter, but once a person has lawfully entered the home, he enjoys equal rights with all other household members.”

That could soon change. The “Jewish nation-state” bill, which the Netanyahu government has approved and will be pushing through the Knesset (parliament), would confer national and group rights only to Israel’s Jewish citizens. It would override the “individual rights” to be conceded to Palestinian and other non-Jewish citizens. If passed, it would institutionalize anti-Palestinian apartheid, undermine democracy and turn Israel into a Jewish Pakistan. Netanyahu has fired two of his Cabinet members who opposed the bill (and disagreed with him on some other issues), paving the way for new elections. Public-opinion polls show that religious and right-wing Jewish parties are more popular in Israel than ever; the bill could sail through the new parliament.

These “religious” tides aren’t specific to religions. Secular ideological and nationalist ferment has also fueled intergroup militancy. And it has often been as malevolent and bloody as movements carried out under religious banner. Karen Armstrong points out that the liberal French revolutionaries enacted some of history’s most savage massacres among the opponents and victims of the Revolution:

Early in 1794, four revolutionary armies were dispatched from Paris to quell an uprising in the Vendée against the anti-Catholic policies of the regime. Their instructions were to spare no one. At the end of the campaign, General François-Joseph Westermann reportedly wrote to his superiors, ‘The Vendée no longer exists. I have crushed children beneath the hooves of our horses, and massacred the women.… The roads are littered with corpses.

Ironically, no sooner had the revolutionaries rid themselves of one religion than they invented another. Their new gods were liberty, nature and the French nation, which they worshiped in elaborate festivals choreographed by the artist Jacques Louis David. The same year that the goddess of reason was enthroned on the high altar of Notre Dame cathedral, the reign of terror plunged the new nation into an irrational bloodbath, in which some 17,000 men, women and children were executed by the state.

Europe’s bloodiest religious and ideological cataclysms occurred during its transitions from one ideational paradigm to another: from Roman to Germanic to Christian, from Christian to liberal, from liberal to socialist and communist, and from nationalist to imperialist and colonialist.

The religious and ideological movements in today’s postcolonial societies indicate similar processes of transition. They mark the transition from colonial-era liberal political paradigms to postcolonial indigenous ones. For many Muslim societies, it also represents the struggle to transform Western hegemonic political and security structures foisted on them into native Islam-oriented ones. Foreign tutelage in these Muslim states is sustaining repressive despotism, while native Islamic movements reflect the priorities and aspirations of the public.

The challenge before most of the former European colonies is two-pronged. One is to douse the extremist and violent impulses of the activists struggling for social renewal. They would abate in the course of time, as have previous episodes of Muslim extremism and violence. The other, which is more complex and long-term, is to build bridges between clashing religious, sectarian and ethnic communities: Hindus and Muslims in India; Sunnis and Shiites in Pakistan; and Shiite Arabs, Sunni Arabs, Sunni Kurds and Assyrian Christians in Iraq.

These communal tensions and conflicts have been touched off partly by the unraveling of the political institutions introduced during colonial rule. European powers and Westernized native elites carved out these states overnight, splitting sectarian and ethnic communities among different states without consideration of their inhabitants’ cultural affiliations or economic interests. Yet the citizens of these artificial entities were expected to identify primarily with state institutions and laws. Those citizens have mostly proved unable to foot that bill. They feel strong communal bonds with their religious and ethnic communities that often span more than one of these states.

There are not many true Lebanese in Lebanon. Lebanese citizens are primarily Maronites, Shiites, Sunnis and Druze. There are almost no real Iraqis in Iraq, only Shiite Arabs, Sunni Arabs, Sunni Kurds and members of other religious, ethnic and tribal communities.

When people identify strongly with their nations or states, they view citizens of other states as the rival Other and compete and sometimes fight with them. When religion or ethnicity claims their deeper allegiance, they are prone to rivalry and hostility toward other ethnic or religious communities.

As the older nations and states matured, they learned, often the hard way, the perils of interstate hostility. Europe, once the most violent continent, has all but jettisoned conflicts between states. Similarly, as religious and ethnic communities in postcolonial states would begin to mature, they would also learn the grief and misfortune caused by communal hostility. They would then be more disposed to living peaceably with one another.

GOP win to prompt new wake-up call

Mustafa Malik November 7, 2014

Tuesday night’s Republican electoral victory poses an insidious threat to freedom and democracy in America.

Yet if you believe in the American democratic system, you have to accept the argument that a majority of the American voters wanted to freeze the minimum wage at its starvation level, allow unbridled carbon emissions and deny healthcare to millions of Americans.

These were among the campaign pledges made by the newly minted Senate majority leader, Mich McConnell, and a lot of his fellow Republican congressional candidates. While celebrating victory, McConnell has vowed to “pass legislation” to put those pledges into effect.

I don’t believe, though, that most Americans would want to see the cruel Republican agenda carried through. I agree with the New York Times’ interpretation of the elections.

“Republicans ran on no message,” wrote the Times‘ editorial board, “except that [President] Obama was always wrong, and voters on Tuesday said they were angry with the country’s direction and political gridlock, taking their fury out on the president’s party because he is in charge.”

I bet the incoming Senate majority leader will have a rough time getting most of his agenda off the ground. In post-election statements Obama has asserted that he wouldn’t let the healthcare law be repealed or minimum wage kept frozen, and that he will push hard for immigration reforms and stand firm on his other key priorities.

But yes, a majority of American voters voted for the Republicans who ran on their sock-it-to-em, pro-Wall Street agenda. And that agenda threatens America’s founding principles of equality, and indeed, freedom.

Freedom includes freedom of opportunity, which lends it any meaning at all. We’re familiar with the statistics of shocking income inequality in America. In 2012 the top 1% of American households (making $394,000 a year or more) scooped up a fifth of the national income. The figure broke the previous record set in 1928, the eve of the Great Depression. America today offers fewest opportunities for upward mobility in the Western civilization.

Studies show that only 6% of children born in low-income American families will make it to the top income ladder. The current generation of American youth is going to be the first in American history to earn less than their parents’ generation.

Corporate corruption and plunder, abetted mostly by Republicans, have dried up many of the opportunities that make freedom a reality. We still have some of what metaphysicians call “negative freedom,” meaning absence of barriers to doing things we want to do.

Let me try to illustrate this through an anecdote about a boisterous party arranged by a group of American soldiers in Germany at the end of World War II. They were celebrating President Harry Truman’s announcement that they would soon be returning home. They had invited to their party some Soviet troops who also had been fighting the Nazis.

As the American revelers got a bit tipsy and wild, one of the Soviet soldiers asked why they had to get so crazy about their demobilization.

“Hey,” retorted an American G.I., “We’re going to be free in our land of freedom! You Commies are used to living under Stalin’s tyranny. You’ll never understand what freedom means.”

“Tell me what freedom means,” asked the Soviet Communist.

“It means I can yell in front of the White House: ‘Truman is a jerk!’” You, buggers, will be shitting in your pants at the thought of saying anything like this in the Kremlin.”

“Sure,” replied the Soviet soldier, “I can yell in front of the White House and at the Kremlin that ‘Truman is a jerk!’”

The point is the Communist didn’t have the “negative freedom” to call Stalin a jerk in the Kremlin. Legal and social barriers had suppressed his freedom of expression, which Americans, mercifully, didn’t – and don’t – have.

The things that really matter in life, however, require “positive freedom,” which entails the availability of the wherewithal to fulfill what we freely desire.

Larry Ellison or Charles Koch can hop in his private jet and enjoy a fabulous weekend or month in the idyllic Alpine valley of Interlaken, or try to savor “eternal bliss” in India’s sub-Himalayan fairyland of Garhwali. But most of the bottom 90% of Americans also would like to do that. Surveys show that their real incomes are less today than were in 1987, and that they’re struggling harder to pay their home mortgages, car insurance and utility bills. They can’t materialize their freedom to spend a weekend in an Alpine or Himalayan Shangri-La because they don’t have the positive freedom, the resources, to do so.

The fading of freedom in America has accelerated since the Republican “Reagan Revolution” kicked off the current era of wanton corporate loot. Americans businesses and corporations have been maximizing their profits by racing for automation, throwing workers out of jobs; freezing wages; curtailing employees’ health and retirement benefits; and other tools of exploitation. All these have drastically shrunk Americans’ ability to enjoy comfortable and meaningful lives, which they’re theoretically free to do.

The erosion of freedom in America, and the consequent impoverishment of the human condition here, has been aggravated by the hijacking of the democratic process by the Wall Street. The right-wing majority in the Supreme Court has helped speed the process with its Citizens United judgment. Thanks to that ruling, Tuesday’s congressional elections were the most expensive in American history, most of the campaign funds being dished out by the corporate tycoons. Seven decades ago H.L. Menken had said, “We have the best Congress money can buy.” And the Wall Street was the highest bidder for the incoming Congress. In fact congressional support for or indifference to The Wall Street’s unbridled depredation has turned American democracy into an oligarchy. The point was underscored by a

Mustafa Malik, the host and editor of the blog ‘After the Clash,’ worked for more than three decades as a reporter, editor and columnist for American, British and Pakistani newspapers and as a researcher for two American think tanks. He also conducted fieldwork in Western Europe, the Middle East and South Asia on U.S. foreign policy options, the “crisis of liberalism” and Islamic movements. He wrote continually for major U.S. and overseas newspapers and journals.