Muslim non-Arab countries such as Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Turkey, representing around one half of world’s Muslims, conduct democratic elections and have had female prime ministers and presidents. On the other hand, Arab kings and presidents are non-representative, non-participatory, and non-transparent rulers. They govern until death from natural causes, palace intrigues, or military coups. The presidents conduct farcical referendums with near 100% approvals. The monarchs draw mile-long queues of happy-looking men (no women) on national and religious occasion to demonstrate the love of their people. Why has Arab democracy been a mirage? The answer is a mixture of three factors:
– America’s strategy to control over global crude oil exports
– American strategy to defend Israel
– Arab rulers’ use and abuse of the Islamic Creed
America’s Strategy to Control Crude Oil Exports
In a world addicted to crude oil, Washington’s control over global oil exports is a non-lethal weapon of mass destruction in the event of confrontation/war with China. Except for Russia’s 5 million barrels per day (MBD) in oil exports, the US controls the rest of the world’s 42 MBD.
GCC oil fields are critical for America’s hegemony over global oil exports. They contain a third of the world’s reserves, provide a quarter of annual global oil production, and a third of global oil exports. They are the least costly to extract. The US maintains 40,000 troops in GCC naval and air force basis to keep supply-chains open through the Strait of Hormoz, control OPEC pricing, protect GCC emirs, kings, and sultans, and ensure their compliance with Washington’s instructions. It is far simpler for Washington to manage a few absolute kings, who owe their thrones to US troops, than contend with the scores of parliamentarians and politicians in democratic settings.
GCC kings welcome US protection. Enemies surround them from the East, the North, and the West. At home, among their native populations, a Shi’ite majority in Bahrain and minorities in Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and UAE are more loyal to Iran than to their Sunni rulers.
Iran is GCC’s major enemy. The UAE demands the return from Iran of three strategic islands at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz—Abu Musa, Greater Tunb, and Lesser Tunb, occupied since November 30, 1971, on orders of the Shah. Iran claims Bahrain as its own. The G. W. Bush project in Iraq (2003–2011), put GCC kings in mortal danger. Wittingly or unwittingly, he handed Baghdad and Southern Iraq to Iran. Since March 2015, a proxy war between Iran and a coalition of GCC states, led by Saudi Arabia, has been raging over the Houthis’ control of large parts of Yemen.
Beyond the Arabian Peninsula, fear from Arab neighbors go beyond military threat, though Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Naser invaded Yemen (1962 – 1967) with an eye on Saudi Arabia and Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait (1990 – 1991) with an eye beyond Kuwait. GCC royals are concerned over the winds of democracy that might blow in their direction. So, the US ensures that GCC’s Arab neighbors in Egypt and the Levant are ruled by dictatorships of “army royals,” who rule until killed in a coup d’etat.
Since the 1952 Revolution in Egypt against the monarchy, non-representative army autocrats have ruled Cairo—Muhammad Najib (1953-1954), Gamal Abdul Nasser (1956–1970), Anwar el-Sadat (1970-1981), and Husni Mubarak (1981-20e1). The only democratic presidential election in sixty years brought the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate, Dr. Muhammad Mursi, to power in 2012. However, army doctorship quickly returned one year later, as Abdel Fattah el-Sisi led a military putsch against Mursi. In Syria, since 1963, the Asad dictatorship smothered every breath of democracy. In Lebanon, a dysfunctional sectarian system of governance is chaos. In Jordan, the king is an absolute ruler in the tradition of his GCC royals. In Iraq, the American occupation (2003-2011) left a broken sectarian country under the domination of Iran.
AMERICAN STRATEGY TO DEFEND ISRAEL
The great majority of the Arab peoples are anti-Israel. A survey of Arab attitudes in 2019-2020 toward the Palestinian cause (Graph 1), by the Arab Center for Research and Policy in Qatar found that 79% of Arabs agree that the Palestinian cause concerns all Arabs: Algeria (94%), followed by Jordan (93%), Tunisia and Saudi Arabia (89% each), Qatar (88%), and Egypt (74%). [[1]]
Graph 1
Also, a November 2022 poll by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel research organization, found that 76% of Saudis had negative views of the Abraham Accords. [[2]] Another poll by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (November 14, 2023, to December 6, 2023), found that 96% of Saudis believe that Arab countries should cut all ties with Israel to protest the war in Gaza. [[3]]
The reality confirms the polls. Almost half a century since the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel (March 26, 1979), and more than thirty years after the peace treaty between Jordan and Israel (October 26, 1994), relations with Israel remain limited to small diplomatic missions, without participation of the Arab Street.
It is far more effective for Washington and Tel Aviv to deal with a few authoritarians than contend with democratic, but hostile Arab parliaments, institution
ARAB RULERS’ USE AND ABUSE OF THE ISLAMIC CREED
In the harsh environment of the Arabian Desert, disobedience and strife waste scarce water and staples. The Prophet Muhammad, a product of desert living, enshrined obedience to authority into the Islamic Creed. The word of God in the Qur’an’s order in 4:59 to:
Obey God and obey God’s messenger and obey those of authority among you.
To stay in power, Arab kings and presidents exploit Verse 4:59. They draft pandering palace ulama (Islamic priests) to indoctrinate the faithful that blind obedience to Muslim authority is a form of piety and that the violator will burn in hell, whether the ruler is an unjust king or a cruel army general.
Furthermore, the ulama invoke Prophetic Sunna traditions [(words (Hadith) and actions (Sira) of the Prophet Muhammad] to obey their benefactor. According to the Hadith collection of Muslim Bin al-Hajjaj (d. 875), the Prophet reportedly said: “He who obeys me obeys God; he who disobeys me, disobeys God. He who obeys the ruler, obeys me; he who disobeys the ruler, disobeys me.” Such wording or its equivalent occurs times in Sahih Muslim and other Hadith collectors.
In addition to Qur’anic and Sunna injunctions, the palace ulama invoke famous jurists’ opinions to legitimize the dictatorships of their benefactors. These Jurists lived through cataclysmic political event that must have shaped their personalities. Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058-1111) taught that “any ruler is better than chaos, no matter what the origin of his power.” [[4]] During the life of al-Ghazali, military commanders of the Seljuk Turks (1055-1153) dominated the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad. Also, the Fatimid caliphs (909-1171), who challenged the authority of Baghdad, were entrenched in Egypt, and the Crusaders had taken Jerusalem in 1099. Badr Eddin Bin Jama’a (1241-1333), who grew up during the destruction of the Arab Empire by the Mongols in 1258, advocated that the ruler is “the shadow of God on the Earth… The community must accept him whoever he be… The imam can either be chosen or can impose himself by his own power, and in either case, he must be obeyed… If he is deposed by another, the other must equally be obeyed… We are with whoever conquers.” [[5]] Taki Eddin Bin Taymiyya (1263-1328), who was born just after the Mongol invasion and served as an official of Mamluke Sultans (1250-1517) and whose teaching influenced the Wahhabis the most, advocated that the essence of government “was the power of coercion… The ruler… could demand obedience from his subjects, for even an unjust ruler was better than strife and dissolution of society.” [[6]]
In the age of liberal democracy, the Arab ulama could just have invoked the Islamic Creed to obey democratically elected governments as they urged obedience to autocratic kings and generals.
Muslim non-Arab countries (Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Turkey), representing around 800 million of the world’s estimated 1.8 billion Muslims, conduct democratic elections and have had female prime ministers and presidents. While the citizens of these countries obey governmental authority out of respect to the rule of law, the Arab masses, around 500 million add to the fear of police dungeons God’s hellfire. As for most of the remaining world’s Muslims, they live in democratic countries like India, Malaysia, and Nigeria and respect the rule law.
Blind Obedience as a way of Life in Arab Society
Blind obedience to authority is a way of life in Arab societies, not only in city hall, but also in the home, school, and the workplace.
At home, in the absence of state social security net or pension programs, the father turns the children into a security blanket in old age. He combines the Quranic Verses 4:59 and 17.23 (children must care for their parents) to threatens the children with the wrath of God if they disobey or neglect him. Nobel Laureate Najib Mahfouz describes the Arab father as the “central agent of repression.” In school, corporal punishment terrorizes students into blind obedience and respect to the teacher. The manager at work demands obsequiousness from subordinates. In the thin Arab labour markets, the employee finds that blind obedience averts financial hardship. As for obedience to the ruler, nothing short of total subjugation would do.
Obedience to ulama’s dictums extends to stifling intellectual curiosity. When in 1925, an al-Azhar scholar, Ali Abd Al-Razik, contended in a short book entitled Islam and the Principles of Political Authority (Al-Islam Wa-Usul Al-Hukm) that Islam is not concerned with the system of government and that governance is a secular affair and the caliphate is not an intrinsic religious element in Islam, the book was immediately banned and vigorously condemned by Al-Azhar.
Arab People’s Tight Embrace of Islam
The attachment of Muslims to Islam is deep. A 2019-2020 survey in 13 Arab countries by Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Doha, Qatar found that 86% of respondents consider themselves as “very religious” and “religious, to some extent.”
A manifestation of Muslims’ attachment to Islam is the meteoric growth of Islamic banking and finance over the past fifty years—from around $4 billion in 1980, to $4 Trillion in 2022, with 1,871 Islamic Finance organizations [[7]].
What does stand behind Arab strong attachment to Islam? Three factors may be discerned:
A. Islam is an Arabic Religion
Over 95% of Arabs are Muslims. God’s word in the Quran, revealed to the Prophet Muhammad by the angle Gabriel, was in Arabic (43.3). The Quran is God’s miracle (17:88). The Quran describes Arab Muslims as the best nation evolved to mankind (3:110). The Prophet, His Companions, and the Sanctuaries in Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem are all Arabic. Arabs feel they are the guardians of an Arabic religion. The influence of Islam is very strong on the Arab peoples.
B. Belief in Predestination
Predestination justifies the rule of a despot as being ordained by the Will of God and that change happens when God wills. God’s Will determines success and failure. “There cannot be the smallest of movement nor the least amount of strength to perform the tiniest of tasks without the Will of God, the most magnificent, the all-powerful”, goes one of the most common Arabic sayings. “There is no escape from what has already been written”, goes another. Daily conversations are dominated by references to God’s will, God’s wish, God’s permission, God’s help, God’s compassion, God’s name. If a person dies on the operating table, family and relatives usually attribute the death to the will of God, not to a mistake of the surgeon. Even an act of self-annihilation is divinely inspired.
C. Political Frustration
In addition to suffering the tyranny of their own kings and army tyrants, the Arab peoples have also been subjected to defeat and humiliation at the hands of the Christian West and Israel since the end of the First World War. As the pressure mounts, the masses turn to the Almighty for deliverance.
The Evidence
Following the defeat and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the First World War, Turkish leaders attributed the calamity to a rigid Islam. By comparison, Arab leaders attributed the defeat to the Sultans’ abandonment of the true Islam. Arab leaders proclaimed that Islam would be their path to greatness. So, while the Turks were busy secularizing what was left of the Empire, the Muslim Brotherhood organization was established in Egypt in 1928, and the Quran and the Sunna were enshrined as the constitution of the newly created kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932, as interpreted by the extreme Wahhabi ulama.
When the G. W. Bush Administration ventured in 2005 into democratic elections in Arab countries, Islamic parties won to the surprise and disappointment of Washington.
Egypt: In the Parliamentary elections in November-December 2005, members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood stood as independents. They became the major parliamentary opposition, winning 88 seats, or 20%. They could have won more seats had they been recognized as a legal party and allowed to campaign freely.
Iraq: In the January 30, 2005 elections for the Transitional National Assembly, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s list of candidates, dominated by Shi’ite clerics, won 140 of the 275 seats, more than any other grouping. In the parliamentary elections of December 15, 2005, the Sistani List won 128 out of 275 seats, also more seats than any other grouping.
Palestinian Authority (PA): In the January 2006 elections, Hamas participated in elections for the first time. Despite efforts by Washington, the European Union, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority to derail Hamas, it won 74 of the 132 seats in parliament or, 56%.
Saudi Arabia: The 2005 municipal elections were farcical theatrics of no democratic value. One-half of the 178 councilors were government appointed. Women were barred from running for office and voting. When the councils were finally announced in December 2005, ten months after the first round was held, the municipal affairs minister declared that the councils would have largely advisory roles on local affairs.
The Arab Spring’s elections in 2011 and 2012, brought the Muslim Brotherhood into power in Tunisia (October 23, 2011), Morocco (November 25, 2011), and Egypt (June 30, 2012). However, the Arab Spring in the three countries was crushed with the active help of the kings of Saudi Arabia and UAE to the delight of Washington.
Muslim Rebellion Against Muslim Authority
Since the dawn of Islam, rebellions and wars among Muslims over political authority rocked the nascent state. The first major Muslim civil war was in 657 from between Ali bin Abi Talib (656 – 661), the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, and Muawiyah [the Fifth Caliph and founder of the Umayyad dynasty in Damascus (661-680)] near Raqqa, Syria. To frustrate Ali’s Caliphate from inception, a battle led by Aisha, the Prophet’s widow, and Ali’s loyalists took place in 656 in Basra, Iraq, in which Ali’s side won.
The second major civil war (680-692) was during the reigns of Muawiya’s four successors against another claimant of the Caliphate, Abdullah Bin Al-Zubair, who was recognized in 683 as a rival Caliph to the Umayyads in parts of Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria, until he was killed at Mecca in 692.
The third major civil war was in 750 with the destruction of the Umayyad dynasty in Damascus and the arrival of the Abbasid dynasty in Baghdad. The fourth major civil war (811-813) was between Al-Amin and Al-Mamoun, the two sons of the Caliph, Haroun Al-Rashid (786-809). Eventually, the former was killed and Al-Mamoun reigned from 813 to 833.
Additionally, there was the cataclysmic event in 680 that eventually shook the foundations of Islam and caused a permanent split between Shi’ites and Sunnis to this day; namely, the killing of Imam Hussain bin Ali in Karbala, Iraq.
Additionally, there was the cataclysmic event in 680 that eventually shook the foundations of Islam and caused a permanent split between Shi’ites and Sunnis to this day; namely, the killing of Imam Hussain bin Ali in Karbala, Iraq.
Exceptions to Arab Ulama’s Indoctrination
Although the influence of Verse 4:59, the Hadith, and jurists’ opinions is strong, it has limits. Injustice, poverty, and corruption cannot be tolerated forever. The breaking point was reached on December 17, 2010, when a 26-year-old vegetable street vendor, Muhammad Bouazizi, ignited the Tunisian uprising that removed the Tunisian president from power and inspired similar uprisings that removed the rulers of Egypt and Libya from office and engulfed the despots of Syria and Yemen in a bloody confrontation with their people.
Indeed, rebellion is sanctioned against an unjust or impious Muslim ruler. The Hadith Collections of Abi Dawood, Muslim, and al-Nasai attribute to the Prophet saying:
“Whoever of you sees an evil action, let him change it with his hand; and if he is not able to do so, then with his tongue; and if he is not able to do so, then with his heart.” [[8]]
A Crystal Ball Gaze
Over 95% of Arabs are Muslims. They believe in predestination. They are deeply committed to Islam. They regard themselves as the guardians of an Arabic Islam.
Except for a minority of Western influenced activists among Arabs, who aspire to secularize and democratize Arab society, and a tiny minority of Islamists, who aspire to impose a primitive Wahhabi way of life, most Arabs are moderate in their Islam. They aspire to an Islamic democratic state. [[9]]
How likely that a Western democratic rule might evolve in Arab countries? The answer is unlikely. Where free elections might be held, Islamic parties will repeat the gains they achieved in 2005/2006. Since that time, reversals of the Arab Spring in Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia plus wars in Gaza, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen have deepened the anger of the Arab street. Even if Islamic parties lose a round of elections later, the pendulum will swing back in their favor.
The Difference Between Islamic Democracy and Western Democracy
The main difference between Western democracy and Islamic democracy revolves around the issue of sovereignty. Under Western democracy, sovereignty belongs to the people. Under Islamic democracy, sovereignty belongs to God, as revealed by the Angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad in the Qur’an and in the Prophetic Sunna [(words (Hadith) and actions (Sira)]. Therefore, the parliament in an Islamic democracy is not the final lawmaker. Its laws are subject to scrutiny by a government appointed body of Islamic experts to ensure that man’s laws comply with God’s laws.
FOOTNOTES
[1] “The 2019-2020 Arab Opinion Index: Main Results in Brief”, Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, Arab Center DC, (November 16, 2020). The Index is based on the findings of face-to-face interviews conducted with 28,288 individual respondents in 13 Arab countries: Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritania, Morocco, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Tunisia, https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/the-2019-2020-arab-opinion-index-main-results-in-brief/
[2] Michael Crowley, Vivian Nereim, and Patrick Kingsley, “Saudi Arabia Offers Its Price to Normalize Relations With Israel”, The New York Times, (March 11, 2023), https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/09/us/politics/saudi-arabia-israel-united-states.html
[3] Vivian Nereim, “Saudis Overwhelmingly Oppose Ties With Israel, Poll Finds”, The New York Times, (December 22, 2023), https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-poll-israel-gaza-war-hamas.html
[4] Albert Hourani, “Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1789-1939” Cambridge University Press, p. 10.
[5] Ibid., p.15
[6] Ibid., p.19
[7] ICD – LSEG Islamic Finance Development Report 2023, (November 28, 2023), https://solutions.lseg.com/IslamicFinance_ICD_LSEG
[8] The Six Books, Sahih Muslim, tradition 177, p. 688; and Sunan Abi Dawood, ibid., tradition 4340, p. 1539; and to Sunan Al-Nasai, Ibid., tradition 5011 and 5012, p. 2411.
[9] Wahhabism, a product of the al-Saud/ Abdulwahhab partnership, was officially born when Saudi Arabia was born in 1932. Wahhabis follow the teachings of Ahmad bin Hanbal (d. 855), founder of the most extreme rite among the four Sunni Schools of Jurisprudence. Due to its extremism, Hanbalism has never had much following. Even today, despite Saudi Arabia’s deep pockets since 1973, which financed building thousands of Wahhabi mosques and schools and proselytization around the world, Wahhabi following is still around 2.5%