A penetratingly astute observer of Arab politics is Fouad Ajami, an Arab-American of Lebanese origin.
Ajami is a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, a regular contributor in the media and author of two of the finest books on the Middle East, The Arab Predicament and The Dream Palace of the Arab World.
In a recent essay in The Wall Street Journal, Ajami provides a glimpse of post-Saddam politics in the Middle East, which he argues are beginning to move in the direction of freedom and democracy consistent with requirements of the modern world.
This region between the Nile and the Euphrates—despite past accomplishments and present resources—came to represent a closed circle, having inwardly collapsed under the tyrannical weight of authoritarian politics.
Ajami quotes a Kuwaiti merchant remarking to him, “George W. Bush has unleashed a tsunami in the region” and, hence, shattering from outside the shell of tyranny in Iraq with regional consequences that would not have occurred from the inside.
Iraq’s election in January was inevitably contagious, driving fear into the hearts of those who took for granted their right to rule without the consent of their people.
The events in Lebanon now erupting in response to the murder of former prime minister Rafik Hariri—popular demonstrations expressing deep desire for freedom and the departure of occupying Syrian forces—would not have transpired without American presence in the region and post-Saddam Iraq, despite its difficulties, is emerging as an example of new democratic possibilities for the Arab world.
We are now witnessing popular movements flexing their muscles in Syria, preparations for a contested presidential election in Egypt, demands for voting rights for women in Kuwait, Palestinians electing their leader following the demise of Yasser Arafat, and Saudi authorities willing to take first tentative steps toward representative government.
There is the unmistakable sense of a wind of change blowing through the region where, as Ajami writes, venturing “into the Arab world, as I did recently over four weeks in Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq, is to travel into Bush Country.”
But Democrats in the United States of the Howard Dean and John Kerry type—with their left-wing coalition of the Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky variety, joined by their kissing-cousins in Canada and Europe—cannot see beyond the smoke of a bloody-minded insurgency bent on preserving the charred remains of tyranny in Iraq and neighbouring countries.
The reason for such close-mindedness is rather simple. It is an effect of lacking in historical perspective.
When Martin Luther famously pinned his 95 theses on the church doors at Wittenberg in October 1517, the rumblings of protest within Roman Catholicism had already begun. Luther’s act was a significant moment in events that convulsed Europe for the next two centuries in the struggle known as the Reformation and Counter-Reformation; events that created modern Europe.
Similarly, the Arab-Muslim world has now been in the midst of a vast human convulsion with its struggle between reactionary forces resistant to change and those wanting their closed societies to become open to the modern world of democracy.
It will take some more time for this part of the world, for so long repressed primarily from within, to surface from its present convulsions into a relatively peaceful transition into the modern world.
Those bereft of historical perspective, however, will refuse to acknowledge a new, emergent Arab reality whose midwife, ironically, George Bush became by sending American soldiers to overthrow despotism in the same place civilization was born a long time ago.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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