Islam in Middle East

Even the word "peace" - which meaning, in its use by Israel's new Prime Minister, reneging on all his country's commitments over the past five years, can ring as hollow a term as liberation, security or terrorism. There is no miracle word to save the turbulent Middle East, less so to define easy parameters to analyse the region and affect its future positively.

More contrasted binary set-ups, such as "Islam and democracy", "Western and Arab" (there are so very many variations: Oriental, Muslim on one side, European, American or French on the other), serve equally little purpose if wording is not carefully chosen: such contrasts easily reinforce theories of latent "clashes of civilisation", now adumbrated in a famous 1993 article in Foreign Affairs by Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington. These parameters can never offer an adequate prism, that is, unless one is intent to see the alleged clash result in a new Crusade.

At the same time - notwithstanding the warnings of serious authors like Edward Said against such essentialisms - one can hardly deny that there is an identifiable trend in the region which comes under the rubric of "Islamic fundamentalism". Islamic fundamentalism exists and is effective, even if one needs to look into all the different set-ups across the Middle East and the Muslim world at large to appreciate the phenomenon's many variations.

How then can one shun clash-of-civilisation types of essentialist analyses and yet account for an identifiable and real trend of fundamentalisms - Islamic primarily but also Jewish, Christian and Hindu? Granted binary parameters, let alone one-word panaceas, will not do, it may be safe to deploy those trustworthy indices which have served their purpose well to guide humanity's march through the twentieth century.

Whether for the Middle East or for the larger Muslim world, deployment of seasoned criteria and objectives can follow the three different political, economic, and cultural rhythms which societies and their analysts have well refined. For the political rhythm: "good" governance of state and society, including the way governments deal with regional and international crises; from the economic angle: expanding and balancing modes of production and distribution; and in the third, cultural, dimension: manufacturing basic consent and containing violent dissent by the appropriate renewal of the legal tradition.

Thus three objects, three speeds for change and three different angles for reform in a region where reform is badly needed.

1. Good governance

Throughout the Middle East the principal object of reform is the state. Again, there is no need, whatever the talk about the dangers of religious extremisms, which are real, to lose sight of the seasoned criteria which are as good for one citizen of the planet as they are for any other.

One may judge political governance by three criteria:

The first concerns representation for the people and alternation at the top. Representation means elections, and alternation supposes non-violent change of government. None of the 20 or so Arab countries knows peaceful change at the top. Leaders and kings die, are exiled or overthrown, but they do not alternate.

But some states have experienced, with mitigated success, middle-level representation. Two points can be made by way of the electoral agenda, granted that, after the Algerian disaster of the 1992 foiled elections, one must be circumspect about starry-eyed beliefs in pure democratic schemes.

First the request for free and fair elections must be encouraged inside and outside at all possible levels, with the hope that it will one day reach the top. Kurds queued from 4 a.m. on the morning of 19 May 1992 in 'safe haven' elections, and there were many more candidates than seats for the latest Kuwaiti, Lebanese, or Syrian elections for Parliament however one might appreciate the flaws in the process of public representation.

Second, more attention must be devoted to the need for recurrent elections. Governance will have turned a decisive page only where free and fair elections are held the second, consecutive time. One consequence for recurrence must be the belief in the need to ban parties, including those among the Islamists, which want to use elections to get there, and stop it ever after. This is well illustrated in Iran, which had known elections repeatedly since the Revolution, but which has, through its Council of Guardians, made certain that most liberal candidates are firmly excluded from the electoral process.

The second point about 'good governance' - a term coined by David Gore-Boothe - is the complex and detailed world of the rule of law. An Islamist who doesn't get a fair trial, is tortured in an Egyptian or Libyan jail, or who is summarily executed by a death squad knows this need no less than the liberal who gets subjected to a similar treatment by a self-styled Islamist government.

Under the rule of law come many other needs, chief among which is an independent judiciary and an accountable administration. Judges and the legal profession in the Middle East struggle against terrible odds of executive meddling, poor salaries and huge case load. It is imperative that the judiciary gets the support it deserves: first because it is there and hankers, as does the public at large, to fulfil its judicial function unrestrained.

Secondly, and in contrast to such pressure groups as human rights caucuses, the judiciary is part of the state, and executive power recognises the need for the legitimacy conferred by the judiciary as much as it fears it. This ambiguity is certainly not true for human rights groups, which need to expend many more efforts to increase the strength of the rule of law.

This brings up the third key element: a healthy and expanding civil society. For human rights activists, like the civil society of which they are part, belong to the other side of governance, and make governance "good" proportionately to their own richness and variety. A good theatrical and cultural scene, like the one developing again in Lebanon, helps the citizens air their needs and exercise their freedoms. Conversely, the pressure on the once flourishing film industry in Egypt narrows down the public space for discussion and debate.

Examples easily multiply. The press holds a particular importance, of course; as does the business community, for whom a healthy market cannot operate, without the rule of law to guarantee investment against the likely predators tied to the ruling security and political apparatus.

Here a footnote may be added over the much maligned "Arab intellectual/liberal",