I also had some private conversations with my host, the minister of religious affairs. At one point he startled me by remarking, “I understand that you visit Israel every year.” I agreed that this was so. “Why not come here every year too?” he said. To this I gave a diplomatic answer.
After I had completed my assignment I was invited to go on a tour of the country, and provided with a car, driver and guide to do the honors. It was an interesting trip and I enjoyed it. In the course of the trip we came to a small town called ‘Ibri. That is the Arabic word for Hebrew and this struck me as a rather odd name for a town in southern Arabia. I asked how it came to have this name. My guide responded, “We believe that this was originally a Jewish settlement, but there are no Jews here now; it’s entirely Arab Muslim.” Then I asked the usual historian’s question, “Apart from the name, is there any sort of evidence of a Jewish connection in this place?” The answer surprised me. “Well, two things. One, the people here tend to be lighter in color than others in the neighborhood. And two, they tend to be more intelligent.”
A Guest of Gaddafi
In the fall of 2006 I was more than astonished to receive an invitation from Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to visit Libya as his guest, for some private conversations. The invitation came through Monitor, a London public relations firm, which was to make all the arrangements. I was somewhat suspicious at this invitation, wondering what on earth he could be wanting from me. After inquiries with the London firm revealed nothing that caused alarm, I agreed to go, accompanied by Buntzie. They offered an honorarium of $15,000, which I refused as I did not want to be in the pay of a Middle Eastern government. We flew to London for a day of briefings and then on to Tripoli, where we were met and escorted to the largest, highest, most luxurious hotel in the city and to our rooms on the top floor. The next day we were to meet the head of state. The journey to the meeting took place in several stages: first, a thirty-minute drive to a small airport; then a flight into the desert followed by a drive to a camp where The Leader was awaiting us in his tent.
The tent was very large and could have held a banquet for hundreds of people. Its walls were swaths of cloth with geometric patterns in white, green and gold. In the far side of the tent I could see Oriental carpets but where the meeting was held, at the front of the tent, the floor coverings were plastic rugs that could be rolled up. The lighting was bare bulbs hanging at infrequent intervals. It was spare, functional and certainly not elegant. At the opening of the tent, where there was daylight, Gaddafi was seated behind a table and at right angles were chairs in front of a low table for Buntzie and me. We were served coffee. On each table was a two-foot-long switch of thin branches gathered and wrapped tightly with tinfoil around the bottom six inches. They were to swish over one shoulder and then the other in order to brush away the flies.
Gaddafi was wearing a black, long-sleeved T-shirt and what appeared to be a brown blanket wrapped around his body and over one shoulder like a toga.
In the actual discussion there were three people: Gaddafi, the interpreter and me. Gaddafi spoke Arabic, I spoke English and the interpreter, a Libyan professor from Purdue University, translated. In the course of the discussion I could not resist my professional teacher’s impulse to correct Gaddafi on a point of medieval Islamic history and the interpreter on a nuance of Arabic. They did not seem to mind and these minor interruptions led to interesting digressions in the conversation.
Gaddafi’s main message, that for which he had brought me to hear and pass on to Washington, was something of a surprise. You are all worried about Iran, he said, as if that were the principal threat to the world. You are quite wrong. Iran is not important and is not a real danger. The real danger, the source of all your troubles, of all the terrorism, of all the radical violence, is Saudi Arabia. He went on to express his deep concern at what he called “the cozy relationship” between the house of Bush and the house of Saud. “It is the Saudis who fund and train Al-Qaida and all the other terrorist movements,” he said. “It is they who are trying to stir up the whole Muslim world against you.” A valid complaint against the Saudis is that they sponsor and export Wahhabism, a particularly extreme and militant version of Islam.
In the course of our two-hour meeting Gaddafi also mentioned that the United States must develop alternative sources of energy. This was a rather odd comment coming from the head of an oil-producing country. It took several moments but finally I realized that by “alternative source of energy” he meant that the United States should buy its oil from Libya, and not Saudi Arabia.
Gaddafi was enthusiastic about a one-state solution to the Palestinian problem. I hear, he said, that a million or more Arabs live peacefully in Israel, alongside their Jewish neighbors. I agreed and pointed out that this was due to the nature of the Israeli state and society. This he brushed aside. This proves, he said, that Jews and Arabs can live peacefully side by side in the same state. In that case, why should there not be a single state of the whole area, comprising both the Jewish and the Arab regions? He thought the state should be called Isratine. With such a solution Israel wouldn’t have to give back the settlements, and Palestinians and Israelis could cohabit in the same state. I understand that he promoted the same solution on other occasions.
Later in the day we were hosted at a dinner in our honor at the sumptuous home of Abdullah Senussi, Gaddafi’s chief of military intelligence and one of his brothers-in-laws. This was a party of fifteen people and, surprisingly for an Arab Muslim party, it included a number of women, two of whom were Senussi’s daughters. I was seated next to our host.
Senussi, unsurprisingly, was preaching the same doctrine as his master: the Saudi menace and the unimportance of Iran. We had a long and interesting conversation which, over the course of the evening, degenerated from high politics at the table to low humor in a corner of the hall as we were preparing to leave. Our host bestowed upon us a number of gifts, a watch for me and a small rug for Buntzie. His sotto voce parting suggestion was, “I hope you’ll come again, but next time come alone. We’ll find you a younger woman.”
My hosts had asked me where we were planning to go after leaving Libya. I replied that our next stop would be Israel. There is, of course, no direct communication between Libya and Israel, but I thought it might be possible to cross into Egypt and get a plane from there. The Libyans did not like this idea as their relations with Egypt at that time were far from cordial. Instead, they chartered a small Maltese plane for us which stopped in Cyprus for a brief twenty minutes to change the documentation, and then flew on to Ben Gurion Airport.
It was a fascinating forty-eight hours.
The Arab Spring, or the Winter of Their Discontent
In January 2011, a young vendor in Tunisia immolated himself and sparked a mass expression of the Arab peoples’ outrage against injustice. From there protests spread to Egypt, Yemen, Oman, Bahrain, Jordan, Syria and occurred sporadically in other Middle Eastern states. It was no coincidence that the unrest erupted first in Tunisia, the one Arab country where women play a significant part in public life. The role of women in determining the future of the Arab world will be crucial.
Developing a democracy is a slow and difficult business. We must be patient and give emerging democracies a chance to develop. Look around the world today and make a list of secure and successful democracies, those countries in which democracy has existed for a long time and where you could reasonably predict that democracy will still be functioning years from now. You will find that almost all of them are monarchies, mostly Protestant—Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, the United Kingdom and the British Dominions. The only non-monarchical countries which have a long, uninterrupted record of democracy are Switzerland and the United States. Even the United States had a bumpy road in developing its democracy—notably coping with such problems as slavery and the total disenfranchisement of women. However, problems can be overcome.
In the West, we tend to get excessively concerned with elections,
regarding the holding of elections as the purest expression of democracy, as the climax of the process of democratization. Well, the second may be true—the climax of the process. But the process can be a long and difficult one. Consider, for example, that democracy was fairly new in Germany in the interwar period and in 1933 Hitler came to power in a free and fair election.
The Arab masses certainly want change. And they want improvement. But what does “democracy” mean in a Middle Eastern context? It’s a word that is used with very different meanings, even in different parts of the Western world. And it’s a political concept that has no history, no record whatever in the Arab, Islamic world.
Many believe the Arabs want freedom and democracy. Westerners tend to think of democracy in our own terms—that’s natural and normal—to mean periodic elections in our style. But it’s a mistake to try to think of the Middle East in those terms and that can only lead to disastrous results, as we’ve already seen in various places. Hamas did not establish a democratic regime when it came to power through a free and fair election.
I am mistrustful and view with apprehension a genuinely free election—assuming that such a thing could happen—because the religious parties have an immediate advantage. First, they have a network of communication through the preacher and the mosque which no other political group can hope to equal. Second, they use familiar, indigenous, language. The language of Western democracy is for the most part newly translated and the concepts are not readily intelligible to the general population. A dash toward Western-style elections, far from representing a solution to the region’s difficulties, constitutes a dangerous aggravation of the problem and I fear that radical Islamic movements are ready to exploit so misguided a move. In genuinely fair and free elections, the Muslim parties are very likely to win. A much better course would be a gradual development of democracy, not through general elections, but rather through civil society and the strengthening of local institutions. For that, there is a real tradition in the region.
An anxious West tries to work out what signals it should be sending and what processes it should be encouraging. What opportunity do America and the free world have to influence this process? I’d rather take it from the other side and say what signals the West should not be sending. And that is not pressing for elections. This idea that a general election, Western-style, is a solution to problems is a dangerous fallacy which can lead to disaster. We should let them do it their way by consulting with groups of various kinds. There are all sorts of possibilities.
The anger and resentment in the Middle East are universal and well grounded. They come from a number of elements. First, there’s the obvious one—the greater awareness that they have, thanks to modern communications, of the difference between their situation and the situation in other parts of the world. I mean, being abjectly poor is bad enough. But when everyone around you is not abjectly poor, it becomes intolerable.
Another thing is the sexual aspect of it. Remember that in the Muslim world, casual sex, Western-style, doesn’t exist. If a young man wants sex, there are only two possibilities—marriage or prostitution. There are vast numbers of young men with normal testosterone levels growing up without the money either for the brothel or the bride price. It can lead to the suicide bomber who is attracted by the virgins of paradise—the only ones available to him—or to unquenchable frustration.
The protesters who rose up in the Arab Spring are all agreed that they want to get rid of the present leadership, but they are not agreed on what they want in its place. For example, we get different figures from polls as to the probable support for the Muslim Brothers. The Muslim Brotherhood is a very dangerous, radical Islamic movement. If it obtains power, the consequences could be disastrous for Egypt. I can imagine a situation in which the Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations of the same kind obtain control of much of the Arab world. I would not say it’s likely, but it is not unlikely. If that happens, they would gradually sink back into medieval squalor. According to their own statistics, the total exports of the entire Arab world, other than fossil fuels, amount to less than those of Finland, one small European country. Sooner or later the oil age will come to an end. Oil will be either exhausted or superseded as a source of energy and then they will have virtually nothing. In that case it’s easy to imagine a situation in which Africa north of the Sahara becomes not unlike Africa south of the Sahara, with growing emigration.
It’s not easy to define what they are for. It’s much easier to define what they are against. They are against the tyrannies which, as they see it, not only oppress them but dishonor their name, their religion, their nationhood. They want to see something better. What that something better would be is differently defined. They are not usually talking in terms of parliamentary democracy and free elections and so on. That’s not part of the common discourse. For different groups it means different things. But usually, it’s religiously defined. That doesn’t necessarily mean the Muslim Brothers’ type of religion. There is also an Islamic tradition which is not like that—the tradition of consultation. It is a form of government.
If you look at the history of the Middle East and its own political literature, it is totally against arbitrary and tyrannical rule. Islamic tradition always insisted on consultation. This is not just a matter of theory. There’s a remarkable passage, for example, in the report of a French ambassador to the sultan of Turkey a few years before the French Revolution. The French ambassador was instructed by his government to press the Turkish government in certain negotiations and was making very slow progress. Paris said angrily, “Why don’t you do something?” The ambassador replied that one must understand that here things are not as they are in France, where the King is sole master and does as he pleases. Here, the sultan has to consult with the holders of high office. He has to consult with the retired former holders of high office. He has to consult with the merchants, the craft guilds and all sorts of other groups.
This is absolutely true. It’s an extraordinarily revealing and informative passage and the point comes up again and again through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
There was a traditional system of consultation with groups which were not democratic as we use that word in the Western world, but which had a source of authority other than the state—authority which derived from within the group, whether it be the landed gentry, the civil service, the scribes or whatever. That could be a better basis for the development of free and civilized government.
The authoritarian, even dictatorial regimes that rule most of the countries in the modern Islamic Middle East are a modern creation—the result of modernization. The premodern regimes were much more open, much more tolerant. You can see this from a number of contemporary descriptions. A nineteenth-century British naval officer named Slade put it very well. Comparing the old order with the new order, created by modernization, he said, “In the old order, the nobility lived on their estates. In the new order, the state is the estate of the new nobility.”
The value systems of the West and the Middle East are different. Opinion surveys show overwhelming proportions of Middle Easterners taking very bleak views on some aspects of human rights, supporting terrible punishments for adultery, benighted attitudes to homosexuality and so on.
Yet, one has to understand not so much the differences between the West and the Arab world as the differences in the political discourse. In the Western world, we talk all the time about freedom. In the Islamic world, freedom is not a political term. It’s a legal term: Freedom as opposed to slavery. In the past this was a society in which slavery was an accepted institution existing all over the Muslim world. You were free if you were not a slave. It was entirely a legal and social term, with no political connotation whatsoever. You can see in the debate in Arabic and other languages the puzzlement with which the use of the term “freedom” was first perceived. They just didn’t understand it. They wondered what this had to do with politics or government. Eventually, they got the
message. But it’s still alien to many. In Muslim terms, the measure of good government is justice.
The major contrast is not between freedom and tyranny, between freedom and servitude, but between justice and oppression, or, between justice and injustice. Looking at it this way makes it much easier to understand the mental and therefore the political processes in the Islamic world. Corruption and oppression are corruption and oppression by whichever system you define them. There’s not much difference between their definition of corruption and our definition of corruption. In the Western world one makes money in the marketplace and then uses it to acquire political influence or access. In the Middle East the traditional practice is to seize power and use that power to get money. Morally I see no difference between them; economically, the Middle Eastern method does greater damage.
What bothers me about the Middle East at the present day is not so much what they are doing but what we are saying. We are transmitting the wrong signals. We must be more clear and more definite on the need for freedom in the Middle East and our desire to help those who work for freedom.
There is a question of whether democracy can work in the Arab world. There are different views on this. One of them says that these people are not like us; they have different ways, different traditions. We should admit that they are incapable of setting up anything like the kind of democracy we have. Whatever we do, they will be governed by tyrants. The aim of our policies should therefore be to maintain stability and ensure that they are ruled by friendly rather than hostile tyrants. This is known as the pro-Arab point of view. In fact, of course, it is in no way pro-Arab. It shows ignorance of the Arab past, little concern for the Arab present, and even less for the Arab future.
Notes on a Century: Reflections of A Middle East Historian Page 35
