Two weeks ago on a theatre stage in Brussels, as part of a cultural project called Shahrazad – Stories for Life – the Iraqi poet and essayist Manal Al-Skeikh (born in Nineveh, now resident in Norway) read the following passage from a lyrical ‘Letter to Europe’: “My experience of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions taught me the following lesson: if people are determined to live, destiny will respond. The Tunisian poet, the late El-Chabbi, wrote these words. We learned the text when we were little but, since it never became a reality, it eventually lost its meaning. The events in Tunisia and Egypt have restored significance to these words and the will of the people was finally given, throughout the entire world, the respect it deserves.”
Overcome with emotion at this point, Al-Sheikh paused to wipe tears from her face, then continued: “Egypt is not just the country of pyramids, Pharaohs and the Nile. Tunisia is not only the country of olive trees and tourism. There is more to the Arab countries than just deserts, camels and oil fields. The West has to deal with a new history. Born at the hands of a different generation, the new East contains the first flowers of freedom that we were always dreaming of.”
The passage nicely captures the balance of hope and fear that has animated the Arab Awakening from its inception. Not since the fall of the Berlin Wall, have political events left such a powerful impression of the terrors of nascent democracy, especially when viewed from the complacent perspectives of the West. One striking example of the threatening differences between the old and new democracies is suggested by polling data on public support for the use of stoning as a legal punishment for adultery. In Egypt, the youngest would-be democracy, more than three-quarters of the population favour this barbaric punishment. On the other hand, in Turkey, the Islamic state most exposed to Western influence (or, at least, central European values), support falls to less than one in five. By itself this makes a fairly strong case for the West to attend carefully to the Middle East’s “first flowers of freedom” – certainly if it wishes to prevent less democratic forces from hoarding the blooms.
Some European diplomats are well aware of the importance of seizing this opportunity throughout the region. Writing in The New York Review of Books about his country’s decision to hold talks with Hamas – despite its use of violence and the denial of Israel’s right to exist – the Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store has written that “beyond doubt Hamas represents a significant part of Palestinian society – and it now controls a territory, Gaza, that includes around 1.5 million Palestinians. It is thus a social, political, religious, and also a military reality that will not simply go away as a result of Western policies of isolation.” Gahr Store readily concedes that dialogue with diametrically opposed interest groups is often dangerous and frustrating. (He knows, having narrowly escaped a suicide bombing attack by the Taliban while talking with Afghanistan’s human rights commissioner at a hotel in Kabul.) Yet he remains positive about the advantages of coming to terms with the new political realities “not only in Egypt but throughout much of the Middle East.”
Engagement with the new Middle East requires a political imagination capable of placing prospects of a democratic future ahead of well-established fears from the region’s troubled past. In the United States the lack of this imagination was palpable as the Egyptian revolution came to pass. Almost immediately after the downfall of Mubarak, the conversation turned to fears of the Muslim Brotherhood. One conservative after another stoked fears that too swift a transition to democracy would empower a group traditionally seen as irreconcilably opposed to Western social and political values. Facing this simplification directly, Gahr Store asks: “Would it not have been valuable to have engaged the Muslim Brotherhood and other groups in a critical dialogue earlier? This isn’t a particularly drastic suggestion. It simply means that we take the groups that are part of ‘the people’ in the Middle East as seriously as we do in our own and other democratic societies.”
As Western governments struggle to find coherent responses to the unfolding drama in Libya, Yemen, Syria and elsewhere, they need to face this future bravely, and live up to the poet El-Chabbi’s confidence in the power of destiny. Several weeks ago the literary editor of The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier, spoke of “the advent of a post-post-imperial moment” in the Middle East, a change of narrative “in which the future is finally allowed a greater claim upon the present than the past.” That future remains fragile, and very much a work-in-progress. In his brilliant analysis of the need for America to embrace Tunisia, Egypt and other nascent democracies in the region, Wieseltier warned that “Many of the obstacles to Arab democracy are still in place. In the days to come we will witness attempts at the political, economic, and theological exploitation of those obstacles. The epiphany is almost over; what remains is the struggle for its consequences.”