At this phase in a still unfolding
process, all one can safely say of the overthrows
in Tunis and Cairo and their spreading
repercussions is that they have thrown into
question the future of autocracy from the Atlantic
Ocean to the Persian Gulf. There are things one
can unsafely say, however. Events to date evoke
three broad, and broadly revisionist, conclusions:
1. The domino theory is not always
wrong In 1975, when the Indochinese
dominos fell to communism, they did not bring down
the chain of adjacent Southeast Asian states from
Thailand through Malaysia to the Philippines and
Indonesia. What toppled was the domino theory
itself - the expectation that this would happen.
The radical Islamists who seized power in Tehran
in 1979 could not knock over the governments of
neighboring states in the
name of that revolution.
More recently,
the Wolfowitzean fantasy of toppling Iraqi
autocrat Saddam Hussein and setting off a chain
reaction that would democratize the Middle East
was revealed for what it was - absurd. By then the
entirely reasonable idea that countries were not
inert objects whose stability depended on having
stable neighbors had congealed into a conventional
wisdom.
Fast forward to 2011. Less than a
month separated the January 14 and February 11
ousters of president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali from
Tunis and of Hosni Mubarak from Cairo. Major
protest demonstrations have also broken out in
Algiers, Amman, Benghazi, Manama, Rabat, Sana'a
and Tehran.
Each of these situations is
unique; the sequence has been not neatly linear;
and it remains to be seen how many more regimes
will succumb to pressure from the streets. But the
whirlwind across North Africa and the Middle East
certainly has illustrated the power of events in
one place to inspire them elsewhere in the same
region, as a domino theorist would expect.
Proliferating linkages in cyber-space have
enhanced the chance that what happens in one place
will be quickly and widely known in another.
Imitation is not the necessary outcome of
awareness. Without their own, home-grown reasons
for revolt, the texting and tweeting Cairenes who
filled Tahrir Square would not have followed the
Tunisian example. That said, however, and other
things being equal, access to electronic networks
has everywhere lowered the barriers to local
mobilization.
A first lesson of these
events is that we are likely to see more
electronically facilitated demonstration effects
spilling across national borders, and more
reliance on the Internet to achieve local change.
2. The medium is not the
message There is no such thing as
"liberation technology" if by that we mean that
cyber-space is intrinsically or inevitably
anti-tyrannical - that "information wants to be
free" in a political sense. Information does not
"want" anything. Democracy is not a tweet. A
camera phone with Internet access empowers whoever
holds it. But cyber-linkages can be put to
progressive or regressive use.
Democrats
are the not only ones capable of drawing
inferences from recent events. What Ben Ali and
Mubarak did or did not do is doubtless already
being studied by more than a few of the world's
remaining autocrats for clues to avoiding the same
fate.
When Mubarak shut down the Internet,
he behaved as if cyber-space itself had become the
enemy of his regime. If dictators are
intrinsically fearful of change, if instead of
using new technology they ignore it, and if they
close themselves off from information about the
way things really are, they will tilt the
electronic playing field against themselves. An
early student of cybernetics and politics, Karl
Deutsch, used to say that power is the ability not
to have to listen, to which one could add: until
it's too late.
For clever autocrats, on
the other hand, the lesson of Tahrir Square may be
that their incumbency depends on innovating and
manipulating "repression technology": that if
halting the flow of information is futile,
managing and using it is not. Coercion can be
calibrated, as Cherian George has argued with
reference to the hitherto successful maintenance
of Singapore's illiberal regime.
The
uniqueness of conditions in that city-state
sharply limits the exportability of its synoptic
and thermostatic model of control. But the
Internet among other channels of communication can
and will be used in efforts to postpone plural
politics in the name of state performance - trying
to sideline the desire for democracy by
acknowledging and responding to the need for
welfare.
Striking in this context is the
February 9 decision by Syria's authoritarian
president Bashar al-Assad to reverse Mubarak's
pull-the-plug tactic by canceling long-standing
bans on Facebook and YouTube inside Syria. His
reasoning, including his timing, is unclear. But
it may reflect a sense of confidence following the
failure of an anti-government protest to
materialize on the previous weekend despite the
willingness of some 15,000 people to join the
Facebook page calling for "days of rage". A
cyber-strategy of surveillance and co-optation is
rendered all the more plausible by Assad's
previous leadership of the Syrian Computer
Society, whose advertised goals include shaping
and regulating the local use of information
technology.
One can hope that the Internet
will help civil societies grow, but cyber-space
will remain contested terrain.
3.
The secular should not be discounted In many academic and policy circles, the rise
of religion around the world has become, so to
speak, an article of faith. The faith is not
misplaced. Since the 1970s, Islam has indeed
become a more visible frame of personal and social
reference among Muslims around the world. The
local versions and extents of that global
phenomenon have varied substantially from time to
time and place to place, but not enough to refute
the existence of the trend itself.
It is
accordingly fashionable in Western academic and
policy settings to downplay the relevance of the
secular in the Muslim world. The toponym itself
privileges religious affiliation as the defining
characteristic of societies from Morocco to
Mindanao. Yet Islam is only one reference point in
the typically multivalent lives of populations
whose actual - as opposed to self-acknowledged -
daily fealty to their faith may range from pious
to perfunctory.
If religion really had the
behavioral weight that the notion of "rising
Islam" implies, the revolts in Tunisia, Egypt and
other countries lumped together in such an
avowedly "Muslim world" would already have
inspired the slogans if the not also the aims of
the demonstrators.
That has not been true.
In Cairo, the slogan that "Islam is the solution"
was replaced on Tahrir Square by a motto that paid
homage to another nation: "Tunisia is the
solution." In country after country, far from
rallying under the banner of Islam, the young
demonstrators waved or wore the national flag, or
showed their familiarity with hypermodern - that
is, virtual - reality in signs proclaiming "GAME
OVER" for dictators.
Nationalism and
cyber-space are not "secular" in an anti-religious
sense. Islam has inspired nationalism in
Muslim-majority countries since colonial times.
Muslim and Islamist websites dot the net. Yet
while some protesters have shouted "Allahu akbar!"
and prayed in the streets, most have not couched
their demands in Islamic terms.
The
Shi'ite majority's resentment of Sunni-minority
rule has been a key subtext of the protests in
Bahrain. But that example hardly reflects the rise
of Islam as a single, shared identity. On the
contrary, it re-expresses sectarian grievances
that have long divided Muslims. And even those
grievances have been less theological than
socioeconomic. If "secular" means simply
non-religious, then the whirlwind so far has been
a secular affair.
This may change when the
wind dies down, as Islamist political parties and
movements become involved in post-euphoric or
"morning after" processes of actual - or, at any
rate, ostensible - reform, including prospective
elections.
Islamists in exile have already
come home in the hope of influencing events -
Rachid Ghannouchi in Tunis, Yusuf al-Qaradawi in
Cairo. The Barack Obama administration's recent
decision to veto a United Nations Security Council
resolution declaring Israeli settlements illegal
will add Islamist, Arabist, and nationalist
anti-American fuel to political fires. But the
young people who started the storm were not trying
to recreate the caliphate. Nor were their demands
for freedoms, jobs, and justice, or their disgust
over corruption, distinctively Koranic.
If
the mainly secular-nationalist minorities who
protested are rewarded with majority rule, more
explicit religious preferences will have to be
taken into account. Yet their likely future
influence should not be exaggerated. It is time to
retire the fear that an Islamist party that wins
an election and becomes the government is bound to
cancel all future balloting in order to remain in
power. The record of democratically empowered
Islamism does not corroborate that suspicion.
From Jakarta to Cairo and back Muslim-majority Indonesia became a democracy
more than a decade ago. Since then, no Islamist
party has won a national election by a wide enough
margin to form a government on its own. More and
less Islamist parties have joined ruling
coalitions, and their leaders have become
ministers in cabinets. Yet the behavior of these
ostensibly religious politicians has not deviated
much from what one would expect of their secular
counterparts.
Pious candidates who invoke
ethical behavior as an Islamic imperative do,
however, run the risk of failing to practice what
they preach. If politics is the art of compromise,
it can also be compromising. Leaders who claim to
cleave to a higher standard of morality are
especially vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy
if their practices transgress their principles. An
Indonesian example is the Justice and Prosperity
Party (PKS), an Islamist member of the current
ruling coalition. Allegations of corruption
leveled at the PKS have been particularly damaging
because they so sharply contradict the party's
association with pious probity.
A more
risible illustration occurred in November 2010
when Indonesia's cabinet ministers lined up to
welcome Barack and Michelle Obama to Jakarta. One
of the ministers was a leading PKS politician,
Tifatul Sembiring. He had prided himself, as a
"good Muslim", on shunning physical contact with
any woman who was not a relative. Nevertheless,
when his turn came to greet the US's First Lady,
he shook her hand.
Sembiring claimed to
have done so only because she had stuck out her
own hand, effectively forcing him to touch it
against his will. His blame-the-guest gambit
backfired, however, when he was shown on video
smiling and extending his own hand proactively to
her. The scene went viral in cyber-space. The
minister had managed to turn inconsistency into
hypocrisy - and himself into an object of amused
derision among more cosmopolitan Indonesians. He
had also reinforced an image of Islam as a
forbidding religion in both senses of that
adjective.
In North Africa and the Middle
East, the Muslim Brothers may be more skilled in
public relations. But Sembiring's case illustrates
the difficulty of observing exclusionary
prohibitions in a modern democracy whose citizens
want to engage with, and be included in, the
larger world.
The views of the arguably
moderate Egyptian Islamist Qaradawi are
instructive in this context. Accessible at
IslamonLine.net, his recommendations on "Shaking
Hands with Women" rest on a complex scholarly
analysis of contrasting texts and opinions. His
major conclusion amounts to a series of negations:
that it is not forbidden for a Muslim man to shake
the hand of a woman who is not his relative by
blood or marriage, provided that doing so is not
motivated by, and that it will not stimulate,
sexual temptation.
Should a conscientious
Muslim be able to predict the future? Where does
an aesthetic appreciation of beauty end and the
risk of physical attraction begin? What if they
co-occur? Does avoiding contact to prevent
temptation prolong and encourage irresponsibility
and immaturity by precluding occasions in which
the man allows himself to feel tempted, but then
overcomes the feeling by practicing self-control?
Is dating the enemy of marriage? What is the
nature of love?
It is not disrespectful of
either Islam or of Qaradawi to wonder whether such
questions could conceivably arise in the mind of a
believer trying to follow his advice. Political
parties that are committed to religious strictures
that imply social closure and reinforce communal
identity are likely to have limited appeal.
In Indonesia recently, fearing that its
Islamist coloration might have become a political
liability, the PKS has tried to soften its image
and broaden its popularity among secular Muslims
and non-Muslims as well. Still more recently in
Egypt, in a Friday sermon delivered to a crowd of
more than a million people gathered in Tahrir
Square, Qaradawi made a point of honoring the
country's Coptic Christian minority and urging
respect for freedom and pluralism.
The
future of democracy in North Africa and the Middle
East is still up in the air, but the whirlwind to
date points toward these conclusions:
Politically consequential spread effects
will become more common, and as they do, those
resisting change will try to rival, divert,
co-opt, filter, and block the offending
cyber-traffic.
In Muslim-majority
societies that do manage to democratize, although
anti-religious secularism will remain rare,
non-religious secularity will be amply evident in
many contexts: demands for modern education and
employment in this life; nationalist pride that is
not slanted to favor the pious; disgust with
corruption especially by religionists with double
standards; and the moderating compromises that
absolutist politicians in competitive politics
will have to make if they want to win.
Donald K Emmerson is an
affiliate of the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies
at Stanford University and a co-author of
Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political
Islam (2010). His website is
http://seaf.stanford.edu/people/donaldkemmerson/.
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