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Newsweek Home » International Editions
Newsweek International EditionNewsweek 
Blogs about this authorMore by the authorBiographyE-mail the AuthorFareed Zakaria-World View

Islam and Power

Is President Bush's plan to spread democracy turning into a fiasco? It doesn't have to. But it does need to change.

NEWSWEEK ON AIR
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Guests: Christopher Dickey, NEWSWEEK Paris Bureau Chief/Middle East Regional Editor; Prof. Alan M. Dershowitz, Harvard Law School, author of “Preemption: A Knife that Cuts Both Ways” (Norton, Feb. 2006).

NEWSWEEK ON AIR
Islam: Power and Democracy

Guests: Fareed Zakaria, Editor, NEWSWEEK International; Dr. Ivan Eland, Director, The Independent Institute Center on Peace and Liberty

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Feb. 13, 2006 issue - George W. Bush is not a man for second thoughts, but even he might have had some recently. Ever since 9/11, Bush has made the promotion of democracy in the Middle East the center-piece of his foreign policy, and doggedly pushed the issue. Over the last few months, however, this approach has borne strange fruit, culminating in Hamas's victory in Gaza and the West Bank. Before that, we have watched it strengthen Hizbullah in Lebanon, which (like Hamas) is often described in the West as a terrorist organization. In Iraq, the policy has brought into office conservative religious parties with their own private militias. In Egypt, it has bolstered the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the oldest fundamentalist organizations in the Arab world, from which Al Qaeda descends. "Democracies replace resentment with hope, respect the rights of their citizens and their neighbors, and join the fight against terror," Bush said last week in his State of the Union address. But is this true of the people coming to power in the Arab world today?

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This is an issue that deserves serious thought, well beyond pointing to the awkwardness of Bush's position. Bush's prescription is, after all, one accepted by many governments: it is also European policy to push for democratic reform in the Middle East. And in fact, little has happened over the last few months that makes the case for continued support of Muslim dictatorships. But recent events do powerfully suggest that if we don't better understand the history, culture and politics of the countries that we are "reforming," we will be in for an extremely rocky ride.

There is a tension in the Islamic world between the desire for democracy and a respect for liberty. (It is a tension that once raged in the West and still exists in pockets today.) This is most apparent in the ongoing fury over the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a small Danish newspaper. The cartoons were offensive and needlessly provocative. Had the paper published racist caricatures of other peoples or religions, it would also have been roundly condemned and perhaps boycotted. But the cartoonist and editors would not have feared for their lives. It is the violence of the response in some parts of the Muslim world that suggests a rejection of the ideas of tolerance and freedom of expression that are at the heart of modern Western societies.

Why are all these strains rising now? Islamic fundamentalism was supposed to be on the wane. Five years ago the best scholars of the phenomenon were writing books with titles like "The Failure of Political Islam." Observers pointed to the exhaustion of the Iranian revolution, the ebbing of support for radical groups from Algeria to Egypt to Saudi Arabia. And yet one sees political Islam on the march across the Middle East today. Were we all wrong? Has Islamic fundamentalism gotten a second wind?

There are those who argue that the collapse of the Arab-Israeli peace process, the war on terror, and the bloodshed in Afghanistan and Iraq have all contributed to the idea that Islam is under siege—providing radicals with fresh ammunition. This is not, however, a wholly convincing case. For one thing, opposition to the Iraq war is not a radical phenomenon in the Middle East, but rather an utterly mainstream one. Almost every government opposed it. Moreover, the rise and fall of Islamic fundamentalism was a broad and deep phenomenon, born over decades. It could hardly reverse itself on the basis of a year's news. Does anyone believe that if there had been no Iraq war, Hamas would have lost? Or that the Danish cartoons would have been published with no response?

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