This past weekend marked the second anniversary of the American presence in Baghdad. If the fragile democratic bloom of an Arab spring is to blossom, many more such anniversaries must come and go before U.S. President George W. Bush leaves Iraqis to their own devices.
Baghdad’s fall to U.S. soldiers in 2003 was hardly the first instance in modern history of an Arab capital being captured by a Western army. More than 500 years after the last crusader knights abandoned the Levant, Napoleon Bonaparte, commander of France’s revolutionary army, took Cairo in 1798. Like just about all of the Arab population centres between Algiers and Basra, Egypt was then part of the Ottoman empire ruled from Istanbul.
Napoleon’s army faced little opposition. The Ottoman lands had by then drifted into a decadent civilizational coma, a process that began around the time the Renaissance took hold in Europe, heralding the beginning of a new scientific age.
Beholding the grand pyramids, the future emperor of France dreamed of storming further east, through Syria and across the Persian Gulf into India, where Britain had long ago planted its imperial flag. But England’s navy, under Admiral Nelson, ended Napoleon’s fantasy and sent him back to Paris, leaving Egypt and the other Arab provinces of the Ottoman empire to slumber fitfully for another 15 decades.
Britain’s rivalry with France was part of the larger drama of Europe’s balance-of-power politics. Through the 19th century, intra-European rivalries saved the Ottoman empire several times. But everyone realized the status quo could not last. European statesmen of the post-Napoleonic period often agonized over the “Great Eastern Question” of how to manage the fate of Turkey – the “sick man of Europe” – and its Ottoman lands.
In Egypt, meanwhile, the brief French sojourn did leave behind some lasting effects. Philip K. Hitti, dean of modern Arab historians, has written that “the people of the Arab world” had been previously “unmindful of the progress of the world outside,” and that this “abrupt contact with the West gave them the first knock that helped to awaken them from their medieval slumber.”
Another Arab historian, Edward Attiyah, observed that prior to Napoleon’s arrival, “the Arabs were still living in the Middle Ages. Socially and intellectually, their life had become ossified.”
The indigenous effort to bring the Levant into the modern world during the decades between Napoleon’s departure from Egypt in 1801 and the First World War came in fits and starts. This deceptively named “Arab awakening” was constrained by Ottoman rulers, whose interests were best served by a backward and authoritarian political system justified in the name of Islam. Little progress was made. It was not until the Ottoman Empire was destroyed utterly in the Great War that progress could be made.
A comparison with India under Britain’s imperial rule is instructive. By the time of the French revolution in 1789, Britain had consolidated its hold on the strategic coastlines of the Indian subcontinent, and firmly established its commercial and military presence in Bengal.
In the next 70 years, all of India passed into the control of the British crown, and a land mass ruled by Muslim kings and emperors from Delhi for more than six centuries was opened to the West. Like all colonial powers, Britain committed its share of atrocities. But its ultimate legacy was to plant the ideals of progress and democracy, and let India emerge as the world’s largest functioning parliamentary system, an astonishing accomplishment given the religious and caste divisions running through the nation.
The Arab Middle East, by contrast, was never colonized for an extended period. British and French armies entered Arab cities, such as Damascus, after the defeat of the Ottoman empire in 1918. But the interregnum between the two world wars were twilight years for Britain and France’s imperial grandeur. They divided the Arab provinces of the Ottoman empire according to their interests, promised them independence and then, weakened by the war to defeat Nazi Germany, were forced to relinquish power in the region before they could put a definitive stamp on its political culture.
The rivalry between Western powers that we call the Cold War put the Arab Middle East in much the same position as during the Ottoman years. Caught between two powerful ideological blocs, the region was fully dominated by neither, and its indigenous dynasties and monarchies were permitted to survive – propped up, in fact, when one side or another found this or that dictator served its interests.
The effect of the Cold War on the Middle East in general, and the Arab countries in particular, was to harden the shell of authoritarian politics. By a parallel process, the quest for Islamic reform during this period mutated into a vulgar expression of quasi-fascistic religious fundamentalism and terrorist violence.
The disintegration of the Soviet Union meant the Arab world could no longer play one Western bloc off another – and made reform inevitable. But it was not until September 11, 2001, that things truly began changing. Taliban Afghanistan, to the east, fell to U.S. troops. Then came Iraq. Yasser Arafat died, leading to a wave of liberalization in the Palestinian Authority. Lebanon is on the way to shedding its Syrian occupiers. And Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria may itself collapse, if some analysts are to be believed.
The fate of Iraq, at the heart of both the Middle East and America’s involvement in it, will do much to guide the fate of the whole region. Despite January’s successful election, it remains an open question whether the nation will become a true democracy. But Bush can draw on history to improve Iraq’s odds: The success of democracy in India, and its contrasting failure till now in the Middle East, suggest the seed of freedom cannot be planted except through sustained Western engagement. For America to declare victory and leave Iraq might simply encourage a reversion to the cynical dynamic of the Cold War era.
Over a period that might extend as long as a decade, America can assist Iraqis in rejecting the authoritarian culture bequeathed to them by Saddam Hussein. That, in turn, may prod similar developments in the rest of the Middle East. In time, the Arab spring of 2005 could bring freedom to a quarter of a billion Arabs.
?2005 – Salim Mansur is a columnist at Canada’s Sun Media. His column appears at ProudToBeCanadian.ca with Salim Mansur’s express permission by special arrangement with him. Link to ProudToBeCanadian.ca.
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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