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Point de Vue de l'Historien
Bernard Lewis sur la Révolte
contre l'Injustice
des Sociétés Arabes
Interview
par David Horowitz
25/2/11-
Jerusalem Post
Traduction
en résumé et principales conclusions par www.nuitdorient.com
Voir
aussi les 50 derniers articles & ce qui concerne
les
pays arabes
- Les
sociétés arabes ne sont pas prêtes pour une démocratie à l'occidentale,
notamment des élections libres et transparentes. A l'opposé, elles ont une
institution incontournable, "majlis al shoura" l'assemblée
consultative, celle que le roi ou le sultan consulte, encore faut-il qu'il y
ait un roi ou un sultan.
- B Lewis
raconte une anecdote de la Turquie à une époque où après que des élections
libres et transparentes aient eu lieu en 1950, laissant la place à l'opposition
dirigée par Adnan Menderes, un homme sans scrupules, une ère de corruption
commença. Lors d'une réunion à l'université d'Ankara, un homme dit "le
père de la démocratie c'est Adnan Menderes". Devant l'étonnement de
l'assistance, il ajouta: "Il viola la mère de la démocratie"
- En
Egypte, en dehors du parti d'Etat, les partis religieux ont un double avantage
sur les autres. Ils ont d'abord un réseau naturel de communication et de
relations publiques, les mosquées, les écoles religieuses, les centres de
soins… Puis ils ont un langage familier et compréhensible.
- Il ne
faut surtout pas se tromper sur le visage complaisant offert aujourd'hui par
les partis religieux, notamment les Frères musulmans. Ils sont extrêmement
dangereux et ils mèneront les pays vers un sordide Moyen Age et puis le pétrole
n'est pas éternel…
- Les
médias modernes permettent de faire des comparaisons immédiates et à grande
échelle. Etre très pauvre est très abject en soi, mais ceci devient
intolérable, si vous vous apercevez qu'il y a des pauvres moins pauvres que
vous.
-
L'abstinence forcée sexuelle des jeunes adultes en milieu musulman a 2
solutions: si vous avez les moyens, c'est le bordel, sinon ce sont les 72
vierges qui vous attendent au paradis…
- En Iran,
il y a 2 oppositions, l'une est au sein du régime, l'autre est contre le
régime. L'Occident doit de préférence aidé cette dernière, car elle est plus
populaire.
- A Amman,
un Irakien ayant fui le régime de Saddam Hussein voit à la télévision
israélienne un gamin palestinien montrant son bras bandé, suite à une
altercation avec un policier. Il s'exclame: "Je serais heureux d'avoir
les 2 bras cassés et pouvoir m'exprimer ainsi devant la télévision irakienne!"
- Un
officier britannique décrivant la modernité islamique: "Avant les
nobles vivaient dans leurs domaines, maintenant l'état est le domaine des
nouveaux nobles"
- Que
recherchent les révoltés arabes. On ne le sait pas encore. On sait par contre
qu'ils rejettent les tyrans oppresseurs et corrompus qui les déshonorent. La
question qui se pose n'est pas la liberté contre la servitude, mais la justice
contre l'oppression et l'injustice.
- Il faut
compter sur le groupe des femmes pour accélérer le processus de modernisation,
citant un écrivain turc de 1880, Namik Kemal: "Nous sommes tombés
derrière l'Occident à cause du traitement que nous infligeons à nos femmes.
Nous nous privons des talents et services de la moitié de la population. Et
nous laissons l'éducation de l'autre moitié à des femmes ignorantes, opprimées
et attardées"
- Un
Palestinien a dit "aujourd'hui, le meilleur espoir d'un arabe est de
vivre en citoyen de seconde zone dans un état juif".
- Un
espoir immédiat de rapprochement entre Israël et les Arabes: un danger et un
ennemi commun, l'Iran. Un espoir un peu plus lointain, l'image d'Israël comme
société libre où la femme a tous les droits.
A mass expression of outrage
against injustice
By DAVID HOROVITZ
02/25/2011 jpost
Historian Bernard Lewis
diagnoses the fundamental cause of the region-wide explosion of protest, and
dismisses Western notions of a quick fix.
Bernard Lewis,
the renowned Islamic scholar, believes that at the root of the protests
sweeping across our region is the Arab peoples’ widespread sense of injustice.
“The sort of authoritarian, even dictatorial regimes, that rule most of the
countries in the modern Islamic Middle East, are a modern creation,” he notes.
“The pre-modern regimes were much more open, much more tolerant.”
But Lewis regards a dash toward Western-style elections, far from representing
a solution to the region’s difficulties, as constituting “a dangerous
aggravation” of the problem, and fears that radical Islamic movements would be
best placed to exploit so misguided a move. A much better course, he says, would
be to encourage the gradual development
of local, self-governing institutions, in accordance with the Islamic tradition
of “consultation.”
Lewis also
believes that it was no coincidence that the current unrest erupted first in
Once described as the most influential post-war historian of Islam and the
Middle East, Lewis, 94, set out his thinking on the current Middle East ferment
in a conversation with me before an invited audience at the home of the
Does the current wave of protest in the region indicate that, in fact, the
Arab masses do want democracy? And is that what we’re going to see unfolding
now?
The Arab masses certainly want change. And they want improvement. But when you
say do they want democracy, that’s a more difficult question to answer. What does
“democracy” mean? It’s a word that’s 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.
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
We, in the Western world particularly, tend to think of democracy in our own
terms – that’s natural and normal – to mean periodic elections in our style.
But I think it’s a great mistake to try and think of the
One of the most moving experiences of my life was in the year 1950, most of
which I spent in
What followed I can only describe as catastrophic. Adnan Menderes, the leader
of the party which won the election, which came to power by their success in
the election, soon made it perfectly clear that he had no intention whatever of
leaving by the same route by which he had come, that he regarded this as a
change of regime, and that he had no respect at all for the electoral process.
And people in
The others looked around in bewilderment. They said, “Adnan Menderes, the
father of Turkish democracy? What do you mean?” Well, said this professor, “he
raped the mother of democracy.” It sounds much better in Turkish...
This happened again and again and again. You win an election because an
election is forced on the country. But it is seen as a one-way street. Most of
the countries in the region are not yet ready for elections.
Yet in
I would view that with mistrust and apprehension. If there’s a genuinely free
election – assuming that such a thing could happen – the religious parties have
an immediate advantage. First, they have a network of communication through the
preacher and the mosque which no other political tendency can hope to equal.
Second, they use familiar language. The language of Western democracy is for
the most part newly translated and not intelligible to the great masses.
In genuinely fair and free elections, [the Muslim parties] are very likely to
win and I think that would be a disaster. A much better course would be a
gradual development of democracy, not through general elections, but rather through
local self-governing institutions. For that, there is a real tradition in the
region.
If you look at the history of the
The French ambassador was instructed by his government to press the Turkish
government in certain negotiations and was making very slow progress.
The ambassador replied that “you must understand that here things are not as
they are in
This is absolutely true. It’s an extraordinarily revealing and informative
passage and the point comes up again and again through the 19th and 20th
centuries.
You have this traditional system of consultation with groups which are not
democratic as we use that word in the Western world, but which have a source of
authority other than the state – authority which derives from within the group,
whether it be the landed gentry or the civil service, or the scribes or whatever.
That’s very important. And that form of consultation could be a much better
basis for the development of free and civilized government.
And therefore, for an anxious West which is trying to work out what signals
it should be sending and what processes it should be encouraging, what
opportunity does America and the free world have to influence this process?
I’d rather take it from the other side and say what signals you should not be
sending. And that is not pressing for elections. This idea that a general
election, Western-style, is a solution to all these problems, seems to me a
dangerous fallacy which can only lead to disaster. I think we should let them
do it their way by consultative groups. There are various kinds. There are all
sorts of possibilities.
It’s happening now in
Yet the sense one gets is that the people in the streets, in
They’re all agreed that they want to get rid of the present leadership, but I
don’t think they’re agreed on what they want in its place. For example, we get
very, very different figures as to the probable support for the Muslim
Brothers.
Yes, we’ve seen 20, 30, 40 percent and we’ve seen attitudes from that Pew
Poll, from a couple of months ago, that were very extreme.
This is my point. And it’s very difficult to rely on these things. People don’t
tell the truth when they’re being asked questions.
Broadly speaking, the notion of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is much
disputed – from being perceived as essentially benign, unthreatening, even
secular, according to one remark (later corrected, by US National Intelligence
Director James Clapper), to being perceived as a radical and terrible threat.
How would you judge it?
To say that they’re secular would show an astonishing ignorance of the English
lexicon. I don’t think [the Muslim Brotherhood in
I’m an historian. My business is the past, not the future. But 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. It’s not impossible. I wouldn’t
say it’s likely, but it’s not unlikely.
And if that happens, they would gradually sink back into medieval squalor.
Remember that according to their own statistics, the total exports of the
entire Arab world other than fossil fuels amount to less than those of
As we look at this region in ferment, how would you characterize what is
unfolding now? Can we generalize about the uprisings that are erupting in the
various countries? Is there a common theme?
There’s a common theme of anger and resentment. And the anger and resentment
are universal and well-grounded. They come from a number of things. First of
all, there’s the obvious one – the greater awareness that they have, thanks to
modern media and 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 everybody else around you is pretty far from
abjectly poor, then it becomes pretty intolerable.
Another thing is the sexual aspect of it. One has to 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 and the brothel. You have
these vast numbers of young men growing up without the money, either for the
brothel or the brideprice, with raging sexual desire. On the one hand, it can
lead to the suicide bomber, who is attracted by the virgins of paradise – the
only ones available to him. On the other hand, sheer frustration.
So you have this explosion, which different regimes are handling in very
different ways. Were you surprised with the ease with which, in
I was expecting a wave of such movements. I didn’t think it would be as quick
and easy as it was in
In
As far as one can judge, these movements of opposition are very strong, even in
A little help from outside? It’s a subtle process. If the help is overt, it
can be used by the regime in
One method is by political warfare, by having some sort of propaganda campaign
against the regime. This would not be difficult. There’s a vast Iranian
population now in the Western world, particularly in the
Tell us more about the nature of the Arab masses, their sense of their own religion,
their sense of the agenda that Islam sets out for them.
Well, you see, two things have happened. One is that their position on the
whole has been getting worse. The second, which is much more important, is that
their awareness of that is getting much greater. As I said before, thanks to
modern communications, they can now compare their own position with that in
other countries. And they don’t have to look very far to do that. I have sat
with friends in Arab countries, watching Israeli television, and their
responses to that are mindboggling.
What is so striking to them?
One particular instance that I remember: There was a little Arab boy whose arm
was broken by an Israeli policeman during a demonstration and he appeared the
next day on Israeli television with a bandage on his arm, denouncing Israeli
brutality. I was in
Take us a little deeper into the mindset. Help us reconcile the discord in
Egypt, for example, between hundreds and thousands of people coming out onto
the streets and demanding to be rid of a dictatorial leadership, which most
people in the West have interpreted as a push for freedoms and Westernstyle
democracy, at the same time as we read opinion surveys which show overwhelming
proportions of Egyptians taking very bleak views on some aspects of human
rights, supporting terrible punishments for adultery, benighted attitudes to
homosexuality and so on.
It’s not easy to define what they are for. It’s much easier to define what they
are against. They are against the present tyrannies, which as they see it, not
only oppress them, but dishonor their name, their religion, their nationality.
They want to see something better in its place. Now 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 –
as I referred to earlier, the tradition of consultation. It is a form of
government.
If we have different potential Islamic paths that these peoples could now go
down, how strong is a more moderate Muslim tradition? How likely is it that
that would prevail? I ask you that because of your bleak characterization of
the Muslim Brotherhood which, again, some experts claim is relatively benign.
I don’t know how one could get the impression that the Muslim Brotherhood is
relatively benign unless you mean relatively as compared with the Nazi party.
There are other trends within the Islamic world which look back to their own
glorious paths and think in other terms. There is a great deal of talk nowadays
about consultation. That is very much part of the tradition.
The sort of authoritarian, even dictatorial regimes, that rule most of the
countries in the modern Islamic Middle East, are a modern creation. They are a
result of modernization. The pre-modern regimes were much more open, much more
tolerant. You can see this from a number of contemporary descriptions. And the
memory of that is still living.
It was a British naval officer called Slade who put it very well. He was
comparing the old order with the new order, created by modernization. He said
that “in the old order, the nobility lived on their estates. In the new order,
the state is the estate of the new nobility.” I think that puts it admirably.
Are you leading toward the possibility that the unraveling of these modern,
non-consultative regimes could return us to a genuine, potential, wider
peopleto- people partnership between the Muslim world and the West? And if so,
how do we go about achieving that?
The only time when they began to look favorably on outside alliances is when
they see themselves as confronting a still greater danger. Sadat didn’t make
peace because he was suddenly convinced of the merits of the Zionist case.
Sadat made peace because
One sees similar calculations later than that. Consider for example, the battle
between the Israeli forces and Hezbollah in 2006. It was quite clear that the
Arab governments were quietly cheering the Israelis and hoping that they would
finish the job and were very disappointed when they failed to finish the job.
The best way of attaining friendship is by confronting a yet more dangerous
enemy. There have been several such [enemies] in the
People talk about American imperialism as a danger. That is absolute nonsense.
People who talk about American imperialism in the Middle East either know
nothing about
When you look around the region, which are the potential enemies which may
be regarded as the greater threat?
At the moment, principally the Iranian revolution. On the one hand they’re
afraid of what you might call Iranian imperialism, and on the other hand of the
Iranian Shi’ite revolution.
The Sunni-Shi’ite question is obviously different according to which country
you’re in. In a country like
There’s one other group of people that I think one should bear in mind when
considering the future of the
He said, “The answer is very clear. We fell behind the West because of the way
we treat our women. By the way we treat our women we deprive ourselves of the
talents and services of half the population. And we submit the early education
of the other half to ignorant and downtrodden mothers.”
It goes further than that. A child who grows up in a traditional Muslim
household is accustomed to authoritarian, autocratic rule from the start. I
think the position of women is of crucial importance.
That is why I am looking with great interest at
Elsewhere, the question of women and the role of the women is of crucial
importance for the future of the Muslim world in general.
A key country which has not been enveloped in these uprisings yet is
There’s not much prospect of its changing for the time being. But sooner or
later oil will be either exhausted or superseded, and then of course the change
will be dramatic.
And what of our other immediate neighbors in
With good reason... Until recently I would have said that the Hashemite kingdom
is fairly safe. I used to go to
The king would appear to be above the fray...
Yes.
And by changing his government, has defused at least some of the protest?
It’s too early to say.
And on the Palestinian front, what you said before about the overstated
assumption that elections are the panacea, that seems to be what unfolded with
the Palestinians. There was a dash for elections, when the only choices were
between Fatah and Hamas. I don’t see people-protests [against the regime] in
I don’t see elections, Western-style, as the answer to the problem. I see it
rather as a dangerous aggravation of a problem. The Western-style election is
part of a very distinctively Western political system, which has no relevance
at all to the situation in most Middle Eastern countries. It can only lead to
one direction, as it did in
Two weeks ago, I interviewed Natan Sharansky. He gave an enthusiastic
endorsement of the push for freedom. But a caveat was: Don’t have this sense
that elections equals democracy. Therefore, his recipe was: Go slower. But he
still seemed to be pushing in the Western, democratic direction. He was saying,
you need to take time; you need to create a climate in which opposition parties
can organize, other parties can organize, so you don’t only have the Muslim
Brotherhood; you need to have a media environment in which their message can be
fairly reported; and then people have to be confident that they can make their
choices without fear of persecution. That sounds very smart to me, but it also
sounds very Western. Are you suggesting that might be a path or that it fails
to understand the differences between the West and the Muslim world?
One has to understand not so much the differences between the two 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. 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 ongoing 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. I mean, what does this have to do with politics
or government? Eventually, they got the message. But it’s still alien to them.
In Muslim terms, the aim of good government is justice.
The major contrast is not between freedom and tyranny, between freedom and
servitude, but between justice and oppression. Or if you like, between justice
and injustice. If one follows that particular discourse in the Arab and more
generally the Muslim world, it would be more illuminating.
So while we look at these protests as a demand for a greater stake in
self-government and a push for what we consider to be freedoms, what you’re
diagnosing here is outrage against injustice?
Right.
And how is that demand met?
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.
So, if the leaderships in these countries were not corrupt and were just,
they would not have been confronted? It’s that they’ve not governed fairly?
Yes.
That resonates with what happened in
The people felt they were being cheated.
It’s the sense of injustice at the core?
Yes. I think one should look at it in terms of justice and injustice, rather
than freedom and oppression. I think that would make it much easier to
understand the mental and therefore the political processes in the Islamic
world.
And so to the
Watch carefully, keep silent, make the necessary preparations.
And reach out. Reach out. This is a real possibility nowadays. There are
increasing numbers of people in the Arab world who look with, I would even say,
with wonderment at what they see in
There are two things which I think are helpful towards a better understanding
between the Arabs and
The other one, which is less easy to define but in the long run is probably
more important, is [regarding
In both of these respects I think that there are some hopeful signs for the
future.