Not sure exactly why all these goings on in the Mideast excite nothing but skepticism bordering on outright cynicism in me - but no doubt it stems from me having zero or very close to zero confidence in the ability of Islam as it stands today and democracy being able to abide each other in anything even remotely resembling a mutuality beneficial way. One has to subdue the other, as Christianity was in the West by the forces of personal freedom, ingenuity, avarice, ambition and the ascendancy of the rational empiricism of doubt engendered by a scientific method stretching from Aristotle to Aquinas to Locke - this hasn't happened in the Islamic world because Islam stifles these things, it fosters societies and citizens ill suited to take up the challenges of freedom and doubt - yes, it wasn't always this way, there was once a strong element of willful rationality in the Persian and Arab worlds, in mathematics and philosophy and science - but Islam crushed them - everything in the secular world under Islam is necessarily subordinated to the wishes and dictates of Allah and the clerics who guard the straight and narrow path thereof. Granted, this repression, this stifling of the individual, this fear of change may not operate as a monolithic presence in the Muslim world, but it is still integral, fundamental to the reality of Islamic rule - just raise the issue of apostasy and you'll see proof of this - which is why Andrew McCarthy in NRO today says this of the looming execution of an apostate in a supposedly liberated Afghanistan:
The purpose of real democracy, meaning Western republican democracy, is to promote individual liberty, the engine of human prosperity. No nation that establishes a state religion, installs its totalitarian legal code, and hence denies its citizens freedom of conscience, can ever be a democracy — no matter how many “free” elections it holds. Afghanistan is not a democracy. It is an Islamic sharia state.Now, I admit it's probably more than just a little bit unfair for a non-expert like myself to make blanket judgments concerning the political liabilities of Islam - and, yes, although McCarthy is something of an expert on the subject he can at times seem more Islamaphobe than well intentioned critic - still, c'mon, at this late date in the history of the species that just how specific the Koran is on the killing of apostates can even be considered a legitimate topic of debate in the Muslim world says just about all I need to hear concerning Islam and democracy - hell, Turkey, often held up as an example of Muslims and liberty peacefully cohabiting, is led by a man who openly admits that he considers democracy to be merely a means to an end that very likely results in a something not resembling democracy in any substantial way whatsoever [and let's be honest, Turkey is only a proto-democracy because a committed secularist forced democracy on it] - the Muslim Brotherhood has come out and declared that of course they want democracy for Egypt - an Islamic version you understand, not that infidel Western nonsense - how gullible does one have to be to hear that and not immediately struggle to choke down an incredulous guffaw?
But the point here is not so much the more general argument over just how compatible Islam and democracy are [although I will continue to insist that it verges on self evident that they're not very compatible at all] - rather, the point here is that it seems dangerously foolish if not outright naive to consistently be describing the current unrest in the Mideast as a native outpouring of desire for Western styled freedom and governance. Not only is there precious little evidence of that, but such sentimentality obscures the fact that there are forces at work here - some a mere consequence of circumstances, some deliberate - that are decidedly not friendly to Western interests and values and therefore may act to worsen the problems endemic to the region rather than ameliorate them.
