Joshua Muravchik. The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East. Encounter Books. 350 pages. $27.95
In march 2008, feminist protestor Wajeha al-Huwaider marked International Women’s Day with an act that would have seemed perfectly conventional to Western eyes even as it touched off an uproar in her native Saudi Arabia: She drove a car. More provocatively still, al-Huwaider posted a YouTube video clip of herself behind the wheel in a remote part of the religiously ultra-conservative kingdom, in which she called on the powerful Saudi interior minister, Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz, to end the national ban on female drivers. Although al-Huwaider wore a headscarf throughout, there was no doubting the daring nature of her protest ride. In a country where women cannot so much as travel without male permission, and where “driving while female” is a crime punishable by jail time, al-Huwaider was literally cruising for controversy.
It wasn’t her first challenge to the Saudi status quo. In August 2006, on the first anniversary of King Abdullah’s ascension to the Saudi throne, al-Huwaider strode across the King Fahd Causeway, the traffic-clogged bridge connecting Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, holding aloft a placard addressed to the kingdom’s absolute ruler. It read, “Give Women Their Rights.” The price for this public show of defiance was arrest and interrogation by the Saudi religious police, several hours in jail, and finally the humiliation of having to be released on the discretion of a male “guardian,” her younger brother. Still, judged by local standards, al-Huwaider had won a small victory: She had made herself heard.
As this rebellious résumé suggests, al-Huwaider, 47, is not your typical Saudi woman. For starters, she is a Shiite and a divorced mother of two, generally unwelcome distinctions in a 90 percent Sunni majority country where female divorcées are not merely stigmatized but ostracized. Then, too, she is an outspoken campaigner for gender equality, a notion sharply at odds with the more traditional Saudi view that women accept their place as second-class citizens. Above all, she refuses to be silenced.
It’s no great mystery, then, why al-Huwaider captured Joshua Muravchik’s attention in The Next Founders, his sympathetic and often poignant portrait of seven Middle Eastern democrats and dissidents who are struggling to bring political pluralism and democratic reform to countries with no deep tradition of either. Besides the irrepressible al-Huwaider, Muravchik has produced chapter-length profiles of five men and two women, among them Iraqi politician Mithal al-Alusi; Iranian dissident and journalist Mohsen Sazegara; Egyptian newspaper publisher Hisham Kassem; Palestinian journalist Bassem Eid; Kuwaiti political activist Rola Dashti; and Syrian author and dissident Ammar Abdulhamid. Together, this cast of reformers and democratic upstarts serves as a kind of argument by example — flesh-and-blood proof of Muravchik’s contention that the Middle East is not only fertile ground for democratization, but that it has a crucial element, indigenous democrats, that may make democracy a reality in a generation.
This broader argument turns out to be less convincing than Muravchik intends. But the individual profiles, based on a series of interviews conducted by the author, nevertheless merit attention. Humane and compelling, they offer Western readers a rare introduction to impressively determined people whose work is inspired by the democratic world but too often ignored by it. That work is all the more notable given the heavy odds against its success.
In this stalwart company, two battle-scarred survivors, Mithal al-Alusi and Mohsen Sazegara, feature most memorably. This is partly because, being of a slightly older generation, their lives are intimately bound up with the bloodstained political dramas of Middle Eastern politics in the latter half of the 20th century. Al-Alusi came of political age with Saddam Hussein’s ruthless rise to power in Iraq, while Sazegara served as a young foot soldier in Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution in Iran. In their years-long fight against the totalitarian regimes they once supported, they have suffered more, and for longer, than their younger counterparts.
Mithal al-Alusi has seen disappointment enough to last two lifetimes, and he seems to have lived them both. Born in 1953 in the village of Allus, in Iraq’s Anbar province, he was part of a generation of young Arabs devastated by the Arab armies’ crushing defeat by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. To assuage that wounded pride, he joined the youth wing of the emerging Baath Party, rapidly rising through its ranks. For all the Baath’s promises of pan-Arab unity, however, the concept did not even apply to party members, who were murdered in periodic purges. Al-Alusi spent several anxious years evading the internecine feuds that claimed the lives of others less savvy, a talent for survival dubiously rewarded when he was personally instructed by Saddam Hussein to serve the dictator’s corrupt and criminally inclined uncle. The new post demoralized al-Alusi. Offered the chance to study engineering in Cairo, he seized it without a second thought.
Distance only heightened his disillusion with Iraqi politics. So much so that, by the mid-1970s, the Iraqi mukhabarrat, aided by the Baath’s foreign network of spies and informers, was urging him to return to Baghdad to account for his burgeoning political activities. Al-Alusi knew all too well what that meant, and his worst suspicions were confirmed in 1976, when he was sentenced to death in absentia for working against Saddam Hussein. After a none-too-hospitable escape to neighboring Syria, where he was tortured and interrogated by a regime desperate for intelligence about its Baathist rival, al-Alusi immigrated illegally to Hamburg, Germany.
The next stage of al-Alusi’s life is a little murky — a reflection, in part, of his penchant for embellishing an already engrossing story. So the reader cannot be entirely certain of al-Alusi’s claim that he had a friendly but eventually severed acquaintance with Mohammed Haider Zammar, a Syrian-born transplant to Hamburg who was identified after September 11 as the head of a German al Qaeda cell and a recruiter of lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta. Equally, al-Alusi’s assurance that Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi personally tried to recruit him to commit a terrorist attack in Europe is not beyond suspicion. It is true that in 2002 al-Alusi led a group of exiles in storming the Iraqi embassy in Berlin, as part of a protest against Saddam Hussein, but the evidence is scarcer for his charge that he discovered inside a “classified message” from Saddam instructing Iraqi embassy officials to funnel money to German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder as a bribe to oppose military action against Iraq.
Whatever the veracity of such anecdotes — and Muravchik might have done more to verify them — al-Alusi emerged as one of the leaders of Iraqi exiles in Germany. With the fall of Saddam’s regime in 2003, he returned to Iraq to begin rebuilding his country in the Western image he had come to admire during his long, forced absence.
To say that this task has brought him hardship would be a tragic understatement. In September 2004, al-Alusi attended a counterterrorism conference in Herzliya, Israel, in keeping with his conviction that the new Iraq should reconcile with its old enemy. It turned out to be a little-shared view. When word of his trip to Israel spread, al-Alusi and his family became the targets of death threats. An Iraqi judge ordered him tried for treason. Even the Iraqi National Congress, the secular party led by fellow exile Ahmed Chalabi with which al-Alusi had been allied, abandoned him. Worse was soon to come.
As violence consumed the country, misfortune struck. In February 2005, al-Alusi’s sons and confidants, Ayman, 30, and Jamal, 22, were killed when their car was ambushed by drive-by insurgents. Al-Alusi, the intended target, could only look on helplessly from their home just a few hundred feet away. Brokenhearted but unbowed, he remained active in politics, inveighing against terrorism and refusing to retreat from his position that Iraq make peace with Israel. His political journey came full circle in December 2005, when he won a seat in the Iraqi parliament. Stories like al-Alusi’s are too little known in the U.S., and Muravchik deserves credit for telling his intrepid tale.
He deserves similar credit for telling Mohsen Sazegara’s story. Like Al-Alusi, Sazegara was a participant in one of the defining events of recent Middle Eastern politics. Starting out as a leader in the Iranian student movement, he became a press aide to the Ayatollah Khomeini, accompanying the cleric to his Paris exile and returning in triumph following the 1979 ouster of the Shah. Sazegara joined the new government, and helped establish its elite military force, the Revolutionary Guard Corps. It was to be the beginning of a new Iran. Then it all went terribly wrong.
Humane and compelling, the individual profiles offer Western readers a rare introduction to impressively determined people whose work is inspired by the democratic world but too often ignored by it.
Hardly had the revolution prevailed than Sazegara began to question what had been achieved. A formative experience came when he was named to head the government-run Industrial Development and Renovation Organization (idro), Iran’s largest car manufacturer. More than a company, it was a symbol, founded on the revolutionary principle that the Islamic Republic had to produce everything on its own in order to demonstrate its independence from the hated West — even if what it produced was in equal parts unprofitable and undependable.
idro’s signature model, the “Peykan,” was a ramshackle case in point. Hailed as Iran’s “national car” — despite the debt of its design to the 1960 British Hillman — it was an abject failure. Customers returning from the company’s headquarters just nine miles outside Tehran would barely reach city limits before their new purchase began to break down. “People knew they had to go to private shops to repair the cars they had just bought,” Sazegara recalls. His time in charge at idro inspired the heretical thought that free enterprise was preferable to the central planning demanded by Khomeini’s brand of Islamic socialism, as well as the corollary that democracy was a surer safeguard of markets than a clerical dictatorship.
One heresy fueled another, and Sazegara soon withdrew from government work to take the reins of an opposition newspaper, Jameh. On its lively pages he advocated political pluralism, free markets, and reconciliation with America and Israel, the Great and Little Satans respectively. In return, he was subjected to government harassment, serving repeat stints in Iranian jails, including 114 days — 56 of them in solitary confinement — in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison. Incarceration took its toll, and Sazegara left the country after his last release, in October 2004, to seek medical treatment in London. By the time the Iranian regime sentenced Sazegara to six additional years in absentia in August 2005, for writing “propaganda against the regime,” years of imprisonment had so aggravated a heart condition, and his body had so deteriorated through protest hunger strikes, that another stretch behind bars likely would have proved fatal. Now in the U.S., Sazegara finds himself once again living in exile. In President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a veteran of the Revolutionary Guard Corps created on his watch, Sazegara sees the bitter fruit of the revolution he helped lead 30 years ago. “We were the tragedy version, and he is the farce,” he observes ruefully.
Not all is dark on the democracy front, of course, as this summer’s ferment in Iran made clear. Or take Kuwait’s Rola Dashti. Having waged a decade-long campaign for women’s suffrage, she finally won the battle in 2005 when the Kuwaiti parliament, after much heated deliberation, agreed to grant women the vote. The following year, Dashti became one of 25 women in a 250-candidate slate to seek a seat in the 50-member parliament. Dashti did not get elected — none of the female candidates did — but she had nonetheless made good on her campaign pledge to “make history” in Kuwait before a single vote was cast. Dashti attained her greatest victory this May, when she and three other women became the first female lawmakers elected to Kuwait’s parliament — too late for a mention in Muravchik’s book but a historic achievement all the same.
More generally, Muravchik observes that the internet has given voice to a new generation of Middle Eastern reformers and bloggers. As democratic ideals infiltrate autocratic lines, communities of likeminded activists have formed in countries where public assembly is prohibited, private organizations are outlawed, and free speech is severely restricted. Government censors have checked the web’s might — Iran, for instance, blocks up to 21 percent of reformist blogs — but they have not extinguished it. One need only think again of this June’s Iranian presidential election, which was notable less for its outcome than for the clerical regime’s failure to suppress coverage of the mass protests that greeted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s disputed victory. Despite a clampdown on Iranian Web sites and bloggers, the arrests of local journalists, bans on foreign reporters, and vicious attacks on opposition demonstrators, news of the protests filtered out thanks to social-networking sites like YouTube and Twitter. Ayatollah Khamenei raged, but the thousands risking their lives to gather on Tehran’s streets made sure that their revolution would be televised.
The political picture becomes gloomier when one considers that such diminutive successes represent the closest that any of Muravchik’s subjects have come to realizing their vision of liberal democracy in the Middle East. Their courage and commitment is not in dispute, but one of the book’s underlying premises is that these democrats are not only admirable in themselves but that their work carries wider implications for the advance of democracy and civil liberties in their respective countries. This seems less certain.
Indeed, for all the grand talk of “democracy,” one marvels at the modesty of their ambitions. Wajeha al-Huwaider hopes to overturn the Saudi ban on female drivers; Mohsen Sazegara is trying to overcome Iran’s ban on satellite television to launch a station broadcasting Western news and cultural programs. The fact that these remain idealistic, even radical agendas in the Middle East, suggests how far these activists are from their ultimate goal of Western-style democratic government. That two of them, the Iranian Mohsen Sazegara and the Syrian Ammar Abdulhamid, are forced to live in exile in the U.S. merely underscores the gulf between dreams and democracy in the Middle East.
Anticipating such skepticism, Muravchik admonishes that the absence of democracy is no proof of its unfitness for the Middle East. True enough. On the other hand, recent history offers scant cause for optimism. In fact, what little political progress was made in the past few years appears to be in abatement.
Recall that with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there was a “democratic domino effect,” as Libya offered to surrender its weapons of mass destruction, Syria loosened its military grip on Lebanon, Kuwait passed women’s suffrage, Egypt held direct elections, and even the reform-averse Saudi royals acceded to male-only voting in municipal elections — the country’s first experiment with electoral democracy. Photographs of Iraqis with purple, ink-stained fingers, voting in the country’s first free election in January 2005, nurtured hopeful talk of a “new Middle East.”
Before long, though, the democratic tide looked like a mirage. Libya reverted to its role as regional basket case, Syria resumed destabilizing Lebanon via Hezbollah proxies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia made a mockery of their “free” elections, and Iraq was plunged into sectarian chaos. Another high-profile democratic election saw the jihadists of Hamas consolidate their rule over Gaza, brutally expelling Fatah rivals and preparing the ground for war with Israel. Overall, little appears to have changed in the region, a suspicion bolstered by a 2009 report from Freedom House, which found that despite Iraq’s improving security, the Middle East and North Africa remain politically stagnant, with Israel retaining its distinction as the region’s lone democracy.
Discouragingly for the democratic project, this political paralysis has coincided with an upsurge in Islamic fervor that threatens to thwart democratic reform for the foreseeable future. For instance, a February 2009 poll of public opinion conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org in several Muslim countries found that while majorities agreed that a “a democratic political system” was a good way of governing their country, they were equally sympathetic to the Islamist vision of having sharia, or Islamic law, assume a larger role in society. In Egypt, 81 percent agreed with the al Qaeda goal of requiring a “strict application of Shari’a law in every Islamic country,” as did majorities in Pakistan, Indonesia, and Morocco. The trend is also underway in comparatively democratic Kuwait, where Sunni Islamist parties have used their ascendance in parliament to pass sharia-inspired laws like a ban on coed university education. (While the recent elections represented a setback for the Islamist parties, regional analysts point out that the overall makeup of Kuwait’s parliament remains largely unchanged.) Muravchik himself hints at this Islamic revival when he observes that Saudi Arabia has become even more religiously conservative in recent years, with girls now forced to cover up earlier in life. Strangely, though, he never pauses to consider what this religious revival portends for liberal democracy in the Middle East.
Such developments highlight the flaw in casting a small group of democrats, however capable in their own right, as harbingers of democratic change. For along with their similar strengths they share a similar weakness: They are not especially representative of the societies they seek to transform. Not only have most spent considerable time in the West, but by their own accounts they think like Westerners. Wajeha al-Huwaider, who attended universities in Arizona and Indiana in the 1980s, before spending what she calls her “best years in Washington D.C.,” says that she felt out of place upon returning to Saudi Arabia. “I felt I was different from the rest of the people,” she says of her home country. Mithal al-Alusi has lived half his life abroad as an exile in Germany, and Muravchik is compelled to acknowledge that he too “stands well outside the Iraqi mainstream” ideologically.
This becomes a recurring theme of the book. Mohsen Sazegara, for example, is a proponent of what he calls “the minimal theory of religion,” which sounds suspiciously like the separation of church and state. Sure enough, Sazegara admits that the weakness of this idea is that it is largely of Western provenance, with no clear analogue in Islamic societies. Palestinian activist Bassem Eid, perhaps mindful of the axiom that democracy is a process by which people are free to choose the man who will get the blame, is skeptical whether it can truly flourish in an Arab culture resistant to self-criticism. It’s telling, in this connection, that many of the democrats Muravchik writes about have at one point expressed qualified support for the Iraq war. Muravchik sees this, plausibly, as evidence of their ideological independence. But it speaks, too, to a kind of resignation: a recognition, born of painful experience, that the Arab and Muslim worlds cannot reform themselves and will require outside assistance.
This invites a question that the author is disinclined to ask directly: Why should the United States, and the West more broadly, support democracy in the Middle East — particularly given all the trouble such efforts entailed during the George W. Bush years? Muravchik’s failure to engage this question more thoroughly stands as the most serious shortcoming of his book. The omission is all the more surprising because Muravchik, formerly of the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of a 1991 book that was one of the more urgent briefs for what became known as the neoconservative idea, adopted by the Bush administration, of “democracy promotion.”
In Exporting Democracy, Muravchik argued that the United States had an obligation, indeed a “destiny,” to support democracy in the former Soviet bloc countries to prevent their relapse into authoritarian rule. Written in the flush of Cold War victory, the book exuded an end-of-history confidence in the superiority of the democratic idea, but in his preface Muravchik sounded a note of caution about one part of the world, writing that “democracy is on the agenda of every corner of the world accept the Arab countries.” Accordingly, the book took an agnostic view of democracy in the Middle East, such that in a discussion of U.S. policy toward pre-revolution Iran, Muravchik pointedly declined to speculate whether democratization should have been on the agenda.
Muravchik now seems more certain in his preference. That being the case, he would have done well to show not only why, despite the potential of free elections to empower Islamic radicals, democracy is in the American interest, but also why, in the face of accumulating evidence to the contrary, democracy as his select group of democrats understands it has a reasonable chance of success. Instead, Muravchik largely balks at the question, asking whether “democracy in the Middle East is a realistic goal” only to shrug that “no one knows.” As a defense of democracy promotion, this is flaccid at best.
In fairness, one can understand Muravchik’s reticence. In the aftermath of Iraq and Afghanistan, the American public is understandably wary of undertaking grand projects in the Middle East in the name of democracy, while the global economic crisis threatens to draw the country’s attention inward. Moreover, with the Obama administration promising to define American foreign-policy interests more narrowly, withdrawing forces from Iraq and engaging Iran, the notion that democracy is worth exporting to the Middle East finds few champions in the public debate. But then, Exporting Democracy was also written against the backdrop of an economic recession and growing isolationist sentiment, and in its failure to make a more forceful case for democratization, The Next Founders must be seen as an opportunity missed.
Muravchik has performed a valuable service in bringing brave individuals to the West’s notice. Despite their best efforts, however, democracy in the Middle East remains an unlikely proposition, at least in the near term. The bleak reality is well-captured by Egyptian newspaper publisher Hisham Kassem’s wry response to the suggestion that democracy can come to the region within a single generation. “I agree,” he says. “But when do we begin?”
