The recent victory of Hamas in the Palestinian Legislative Council elections probably has more to do with the incompetence and corruption of Abu Mazen’s Fatah than it does with the enthusiasm of the Palestinian people—a relatively secular bunch given the neighborhood—for theocratic governance and Islamist extremism. Still, the triumph of Hamas in a legitimate, democratic election seems to be part of a larger wave of Islamist ascension through more-or-less democratic means throughout the Middle East: the success of the Iranian-backed Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq in the recent Iraqi elections, modest gains by Hezbollah in the 2005 elections for the Lebanese Parliament, and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt becoming the largest opposition group in parliament.
Some commentators in the West suggest that this Islamist rise with a populist, democratic stamp is merely a chickens-come-home-to-roost scenario for a Bush Administration that touted democracy as a panacea for the Middle East; that, somewhat ironically, a dose of Western-style representative democracy allows Islamist fundamentalism to more smoothly rise to power.
If that is the case, then the much maligned clash of civilizations argument has something to recommend it. As for Hamas, for the moment, we can hope that the pothole theory —the idea that Islamist radicals are moderated when involved in the minutiae of civil governance—holds true.
However, in the long term, we need to begin to have a discussion in this country about how Arab and Middle Eastern societies might be fundamentally different than ours—an admitted generalization. If a country is full of ideologues and given to extremist enthusiasms—e.g. in 2005 60% of Jordanians had a lot or some confidence in bin Laden as a world leader—then democracy might not be such a good thing.
The West doesn’t have a monopoly on values such as pluralism, democratic government, separation of church and state, equality between the sexes, and secular rationality. But perhaps we should be more hesitant in the future before we start dipping our fingers into societies whose core civilizational principles are different, and maybe incompatible, with our own.
