Religion Dispatches
The tragedy of a dictatorship is that they so eviscerate their countries that, even after they are gone, it’s hard for people to pick up the pieces and move forward. But I am hopeful in seeing the banner of the pre-Qaddafi monarchy rooted in the Sufi orders that led the resistance to colonialism.
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Along comes Jersey Shore with its cast of self-described Italians. These are not the magical white folks of world-conquering, democracy-building myth-but they’re still “white”. They behave like the Museum assumes only people of my color behaved. The sum total of their television life is a kind of late-capitalist tragic anthropology: doing laundry to go to parties, in order to have sex. For me, it’s been tremendously liberating to know that people of my color and faith are not the only people who are embarrassing to watch on television.
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Assuming religious politics will play a significant role in the new government after the elections, will it be radical, moderate, or just the familiar gridlock experienced by most democracies?
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Left or Right, the market always seems to win. This is actually where I would locate the greater threat to Arab democracy, and the temptation to slide into some form of authoritarianism, older or newer. As the people of the region confront the reality that they have little say over economic policy, and will be forced to accede to the contingencies of global capitalism, they may well become immensely frustrated by the scale of change and demand something different. Considering how volatile European and American politics have become, and how frequently we now see street protests and even supposedly stable and demure countries, how much more so these new democracies?
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What the anxious West has failed to recognize in the Arab Spring is that the political transformations of the Middle East are the coming of age of a new Islamism.
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Despite a media blackout on the killing of Shaykh Emad, who refused to see the protests as illegitimate rebellion, Twitter and Facebook were on fire with expressions of sadness and outrage.
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If we read the Arab Spring as a zero-sum game between Islamists and secularists, we’re going to miss what’s happening; if we imagine Arab democracy will look like secular Western democracy, we will likely be disappointed. And if we assume reference to Islam and democracy reveals only hypocrisy, insincerity, or ideological confusion, we’re likely to be surprised.
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Seeing what happened to Qaddafi, it is hard to deny there is not an epic arc of evil rising and consuming itself. Still, those who rage at dictators should also tremble at any tendency in their direction.
Read MoreIf Egypt’s democracy takes hold it will, along with Turkey, help elbow out the Islamist movements we’re used to hearing about.
Read MoreSo the FJP says to the FEP: hey, you’ve insulted Islam.
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