1. Bill Narvey said:

Michael Rubin’s November 20th, 2005 article, “The Middle East’s Real Bane: Corruption” postulates that the root cause hindering democratic political reform and stability in the Middle East is not terrorism, but rather corruption. He concludes that until Arab citizens hold their leaders accountable, the democracy debate will be moot.

Corruption is however no more a cause for Middle East resistance to democratic reforms than is Muslim terrorism, intolerance and hatred of non-Muslims, intolerance and hatreds between Muslims such as the ongoing often violent disputes between Sunni and Shia Muslims, lack of respect for women, lack of tolerance for any view that is the least bit critical of Islam, whether that view is expressed by a Muslim or non-Muslims within or from outside those Middle East societies and certainly Muslims’ lack of tolerance within such dictatorial Middle East societies that is in the least bit critical of the policies, perceptions and attitudes of the dictator or Muslim regime in power.

All these foregoing characteristics of most of Middle East Muslim societies are symptoms or manifestations, if you will, that derive from Muslim culture. It is that culture that stands in the way of democracy rooting in the Middle East. It is that culture which governs Muslim perceptions, attitudes, beliefs and values, many of which stand in stark contrast or in opposition to those of democratic nations and societies.

For the majority of Middle Eastern Muslims, the grip of their culture is vice like.

Consider for a moment as well the fact that the democratic political systems most African states inherited when they gained independence, degenerated into brutal dictatorships whereby corruption was the hallmark of the leaders’ who destroyed their nations economies and impoverished their people for their own gain and wealth.

Democracy and democratic societies were inspired and shaped by Judeo-Christian cultures and it was within that historical cultural context that democracies and democratic societies have evolved.

Judeo-Christian culture however is not the culture of the Muslim world or of many African nations where democracy failed to be sustained when those of Judeo-Christian background who governed these African nations, left governance to the native Africans on their gaining their independence.

Whether a Westerner ascribes to Samuel Huntington’s paradigm of the “Clash of Civilizations” to explain the current trend of global politics or not, on close examination and comparison of Western Judeo-Christian culture to the cultures of those nations and societies that did not develop political systems based on such Judeo-Christian culture, many cultural differences are easily seen and the potential for those differences to lead to serious, if not deadly conflict cannot be easily dismissed.

The differences between Islamic and Judeo-Christian cultures and political systems and the significance of those differences has been the subject of much thought and debate amongst intellectuals and pundits, as has the significance of the centuries old deeply ingrained sense of angry Muslim victimhood at the hands of the evil West that serves Muslims to explain how in spite of Islam’s superiority, Islam has been overtaken by the West in all fields of human endeavor.

At every opportunity, Muslims throughout history have asserted their belief in the superiority of their Islamic society by conquering, dominating, subjugating and humiliating those non-Muslims under their power and control.

The West, led by America has been doing its level best to avoid overtly drawing negative comparisons between Islamic and Judeo-Christian cultures and history or conceptualizing radical Islam and its attacks against Westerners and Western institutions by its soldiers of terror as a war between Islam and the West.

Muslim hatreds and suspicions of the West abound and America and especially Israel come in for the most hatred.

With so much hatred of non-Muslims and Jews especially bound up in Muslim culture and that culture advocating values, laws, morality, perceptions and attitudes that are so antithetical to Judeo Christian culture and indeed democratic values, it is difficult to conceive that democracy of the kind we enjoy in the West has much chance of soon rooting in the Middle East.

The Bush administration’s effort to democratize the Middle East assumes that by Middle East nations becoming democratic, those Muslim nations would necessarily be adopting at least some fundamental characteristics of the Judeo-Christian basis for democracy and in the result Muslim nations would become more like Western democratic societies.

It does not necessarily follow however that Islamic democracy would be like Western democracies or that Muslim societies would become more like Western societies.

While Muslim democratic societies might function as Western democracies in terms of political structure and the freedom of Muslim citizens to choose their leaders by election, the differing political platforms offered Middle East Muslim citizens to choose from, would be within the context of Islamic culture, just as the variety of different political platforms offered the electorate in Western societies all are within the context of Judeo-Christian culture.

If the Middle East Muslim nations were to adopt a democratic political system, unless there was a concurrent acceptance by both the Muslim government and its society of many fundamental democratic ideals based on Judeo-Christian beliefs, values and laws that characterize Western society, which acceptance now seems impossible to conceive of, it is doubtful the world will have strayed very far, if at all from the path that Samuel Huntington contended was leading to a “Clash of Civilizations”.