Dictatorship in the Muslim world or ‘Eastern despotism’
by Hajrudin Somun*

 Thus demonstrations in Egypt and Tunisia against the government were immediately labeled a revolution and compared to the fall of the Berlin Wall. A domino effect is also being predicted for the whole Arab world. The New York Times wrote about “a new Middle East remade in the manner of Europe 1989.”

Ten days ago I still believed the Tunisian uprising, followed by similar demonstrations and riots in other countries in the region, would not have a larger or deeper effect on the Arab world, at least not as soon as was being predicted. “Tunis is not Berlin, and it is not at a crossroads of the big powers’ interests, as Germany had been,” I told the media in my country. Maybe in a few other places rulers, more or less authoritarian, will be replaced in the manner described by Tunisian poet Aboul-Qacem Echebbi’s verse of warning, “Who grows thorns will reap wounds.” Dictators know well how to behave in such circumstances. After every rebellion they tighten the iron chain of torture and fear around the poor masses, while hungry peasants, workers and students tighten their belts even more around their emaciated bodies. They get a little more simulated democracy, but less bread and freedom.

Middle East no longer the same

However, when the peaceful demonstrations in Cairo grew into an open revolt against the Egyptian regime of President Hosni Mubarak and when it extended to other cities and left hundreds of victims, I became less convinced that the Middle East would be the same tomorrow as it has been over the last few decades.

Egypt is not Tunisia or Yemen. Egypt has often been equated to the entire Middle East due to its role in issues of peace and war during the last century. Mubarak’s regime alone has significantly contributed to Egypt’s poverty and degradation, as well as to its international isolation. Now, whether Mubarak leaves power or not, his regime is coming to an end. Anarchy will hopefully be avoided and Egypt will return to its deserved geopolitical position. The region it is in has already seen developments -- the US invasion of Iraq and Israel’s invasion of Gaza, to name only two -- that have and are significantly changing the disposition of foreign powers’ interests and involvement. Who could have imagined only a few years ago that non-Arab nations Iran and Turkey would overshadow the policies of the eastern part of “the great Arab nation,” the pure “Umma Arabiyya”? And who could have predicted Israel would be on high alert in the 2010s because it would be abandoned by the only two strategic allies in the region -- a stable Turkey and a surging Egypt?

Perhaps the Middle East needs such drastic steps to move toward more democratic and civic societies and to enable a final breakthrough in solving the Palestinian issue. Had it been solved on time -- in the middle of the last century -- by enabling Jews and Palestinians to live together in a federal state, on their common “holy land,” many things would look different in the region today, including the systems of governance.

Due to the extreme uncertainty surrounding the current uprisings in the Middle East, I would like to contemplate about some aspects of just that question -- the absence of democratic rule and the roots of totalitarianism in the region, but not only there.

Whenever a speech is made about the Middle East, I like to return to the end of World War I, when England and France drew up maps of new states on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Back then, when lions and tigers could still meet in the same lands, the seeds of all later strife and conflict were sown. The historical rights of local peoples were neglected and the Britons, just like in a feudal system, granted wide swaths of land to tribal chiefs who helped them overthrow the Turkish Empire. Today’s Iraq and Jordan were created this way. Once installed, rulers find hundreds of reasons and means to prolong their rule, be it a kingdom, an emirate, a republic, a federation or a union. Revenue from oil was enough to satisfy Western exploiters and from the rest to feed the military, police and security apparatus obedient to local rulers. I agree with the American scholar Larry Diamond, quoted extensively just these days by Şahin Alpay in Today’s Zaman, that tremendous and unearned income from oil and gas still today “hinders overall socio-economic development” in Arab countries. I am also glad that Diamond shares the views of some Muslim scholars that the lack of democratic regimes in Arab countries cannot be explained by Islam.

The issue of dictatorships

I would especially like to stress that dictatorships are not the privilege of the Arab or broader Muslim-majority areas, as is often voiced by the Orientalist attitude. This much can easily be seen from a cursory list of rulers who still flourish on all continents and who, simply defined, do not care about constitutions and parliaments, nor the judiciary and the opposition, though they would like to have all these in their countries. There was Idi Amin, but Haile Selassie as well, Hosni Mubarak but also Robert Mugabe, Moammer Gaddafi but also Kim Jong-il. Of those I have seen or met, the father of North Korea’s Kim surpassed all my imagination of totalitarian rule. Some say Europe had no dictator after Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Franco. However, what other system of rule did state and party leaders of the former communist countries belong to? And former French President Charles de Gaulle was not far from authoritarian rule either.

Prior to Islam or any other faith and ideology, the roots of dictatorial rule could be sought in the historical heritage, social circumstances and educational or other backwardness. Revolutions and uprisings against such rule brake out when there is enough discontent among the masses, but above all when the people are unhappy with the social situation within a state. They are led by the bourgeois elite, as was the case during the French revolution, highly educated theologians as in Iran, or the middle class as in today’s Tunisia. The common slogan of their followers, however, is “Give us more bread and freedom.” As most revolutions “eat their children,” thus the French deserved Napoleon, the Iranians got the rule of ayatollahs, and we have yet to see what the Egyptians and Tunisians will have.

The course of history wanted for the Arab and Muslim world to have most of the authoritarian rulers in the last half century. It is the subject of academic studies how much of a contribution was made by the Islamic world, after many centuries of intellectual and overall bloom and prosperity, falling into lethargy and isolation while the Western world achieved the Renaissance and entered the era of modernization and democratization. That backwardness corresponded with the rise of colonialism, which affected almost the entire Muslim world, stretching from Algeria to Indonesia.

The view of numerous Muslim thinkers is that submission to dictatorship -- as a component of the Eastern, or better to say Asian, cultures -- prepared the ground for the continuation of authoritarianism and dictatorship in territories inhabited mostly by Muslims. The process of the acceptance and continuation until our times of the pre-Islamic totalitarian mentality might be followed in less “Eastern” societies, as is the case in the Middle East. Many Egyptians unconsciously call Hosni Mubarak pharaoh and Saddam Hussein dreamed of becoming a new Hammurabi more so than a new Harun al-Rashid. Such an understanding of “Eastern despotism” I would, however, defend, especially considering the situation in today’s Central Asian states.

The leaders of these countries have very effectively combined the rich inheritance of their distant Mongol ancestors with the Stalinism they adopted while part of the Soviet Union. Religion -- that is Islam -- they use only as a mask before the masses, which are becoming more and more religious. It is enough to cite only the example of Turkmenistan, whose former president, Suparmurat Niyazov, changed even the official calendar, naming its months after his family and relatives. Developments in that region show, as well as in the Middle East over the last few decades and now the most recent uprising in Egypt, that it is very difficult to eliminate the inherited spirit of submission to dictatorship as one of the main conditions to eliminate totalitarian rule itself.

All these considerations about dictatorship could be interpreted “this way or that,” but, speaking for myself, I would not like to ever again feel the special fear I, as a foreigner, felt while meeting Saddam Hussein. And one can only imagine what the Iraqis were feeling!

Herzegovina to Turkey and a lecturer of the history of diplomacy at Philip Noel-Baker International University in Sarajevo.