Saad Eddin Ibrahim was
arrested on June 30, 2000 and was convicted in 2001 on false
charges that he embezzled funds and disseminated false
information harmful to the interests of Egypt.
Although sentenced to seven years, he was acquitted by
Egypt's high court in 2003. Described as
the Andrei Sakharov of the Middle East, Ibrahim has
been a tireless human rights and pro-democracy activist not
only for his native Egypt, but throughout the region as well. He is
also a scholar who has deepened the understanding of Islamic
thought and its relationship to democracy, modernity and
liberalism. A staunch critic of the notion of "Arab exceptionalism"
prevalent in the West and the clash of civilizations thesis, he advocates a universalist conception of democracy and human rights.
Ibrahim is the founder
and director of the Ibn
Khaldun Center for Development Studies and is currently
a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. He is also a candidate for president in Egypt. This
interview was held in March 2005 in New York City.
Q: Hosni Mubarak
has announced that there will be open elections in Egypt. I
was wondering how you'd characterize these elections? Do
they signal any kind of authentic political change in
Egypt?
A: They do, they signal
at least a new direction and I am personally grateful this
has happened and while it is a baby step on a thousand mile
journey, it is an important step. As much as I criticize
Mubarak, I have to give him credit when he does well and
this is one of the rare good things that he’s done, after
long protracted resistance. Until a month before his
announcement he was saying
there was no way that they would change the constitution to
allow for contested elections. I don’t know how familiar you
are with all this, but Egypt has had a constitution since
1971—which can actually be traced back 20 years
earlier—which filled the office of the presidency not by
contested election but with something called a “referendum”
where only one name appears on the ballot and the citizens, if they care
at all to participate, vote either “yes” or “no.” Of course,
often people stay away and don’t even bother voting, and the
ones who do go will usually vote “yes.”
That is why the state
can always announce that Mubarak was elected by 99%, and of
course in some cases 100%, of the voting population. Of
course this was the same thing with Saddam Hussein. In
Egypt, those who do vote have to provide their name and sign
their ballot as well as provide their address.
So to allow at least
some means to shape the process by which elections take
place, by moving away from the referendum vote and toward
contested elections, is, to me, a very important step, even
though by any democratic standard it is a baby step.
Q: What do you
think the reasons are for Mubarak suddenly changing his
position and allowing contested elections?
A: Since I was released
from prison I openly challenged the man. That challenge
escalated about 5 months ago when I said if he dares, if he
thinks he is popular, then let him run in a free and open
election. I repeated that over and over and three other
public figures followed me and declared that they would also
run and they demanded that Mubarak debate with them.
So the four of us
applied pressure and then the Parliament ratified the a
draft of the amendment to allow contested elections. But
you see, the idea is to break that barrier of fear that is
ingrained in the Middle East—not unlike the way it was
ingrained in Eastern Europe, in the Soviet Union, under
totalitarian, authoritarian regimes—in which people live in
fear and think that there is no alternative and that they
have to subject themselves to a continuous system of
oppression.
Now a few of us have
dared to challenge that and to break that pattern, and some
of us have paid the price for it. But we continue and I
think I must say that over the last ten years it was a very
confrontational struggle, the last half of which I was in
prison, but it paid off and I think it was to signal to
other Arab countries and other Third World. You can look at
us as another Ukraine, another Czechoslovakia, another
Georgia, another Poland, because these countries have gone
through similar regimes of communism, even longer, for
longer periods and have undergone even harsher political
systems. So I am hopeful as an activist and I never will
give up. And I see hope not only for Egypt but for the
entire region.
Q: Does this mean
a kind of expansion or a rebirth or even a birth of a kind
of public sphere in Egypt? I mean will this lead to the
level of newspapers, journals, the university system, the
education system. Will this continue to spread?
A: It will. It is
happening very slowly, but very steadily. I organized four
rallies before I left Egypt and I think the first rally
started with 100 people and the fourth one had a thousand
people and now there are others organizing rallies and
protests. This would have been unheard of two or three years
ago, even one year ago, but now it is not. The first time
there was a direct challenge to the regime happened only one
year ago. The only kind of rallies that were allowed by the
regime were anti-American and anti-Israeli rallies.
Q: And Mubarak has
also opened new relations with Israel.
A: Yes, he did this
when the US and Europe began making some noise about
democracy in the Middle East. Mubarak thinks that if he
defines his role in the Arab-Israeli conflict and if he
mediates an Israeli-Palestinian deal, that somehow this will
endear him to the West and get him off the hook and ward off
the rising tide of resistance that is growing in Egypt.
Q: So should are
we witnessing the beginnings of an authentic change in the
region?
A: Well you have the
Orientalists or some so-called Arabists, or area specialists
who talk a lot about “Arab exceptionalism”: this idea that
democracy cannot exist in the Arab world. Somehow the
democratic changes that spread throughout the Third
World starting in Portugal back in 1974, and then moved to
Spain, and then to Greece, then to Latin America and back to
East Asia and then to Eastern and Central Europe and what we
social scientists called the third wave of democracy has not
rooted itself in the Middle East. Of course, this third wave
is now 31 years old and people wonder why has the wave not
yet broken at the Arab shores? And some people have said
well, it’s Arab exceptionalism: that there is something
about our culture, or Islam, which somehow defies
democracy. And of course a few of us who have been fighting
for democracy in the region have taken issue with this kind
of proposition. Arab exceptionalism? We are human beings
like everybody else, and we can have democracy too.
Many people do not
realize that Egypt, for example, had its first constitution
and its first elected political party back in 1866—very few
people recognize this or remember it. And we have had a
liberal age from the middle of the 19th Century
to the middle of the 20th century, but because of
the last 30 years, peoples’ memories—at least outside the
region—have become tuned or conditioned to thinking that the
problems in the Middle East must be a chronic condition, not
that they are only 30 years old, and not realizing that the
reason for the current state of the Middle East was first,
the Arab-Israeli conflict, and two, the Cold War.
The Cold War made the
United States and other western democracies look the other
way when it came to political oppression and allowed them to
deal with tyrants and dictators. But even President Bush,
with his limited reading of world history, or whoever writes
his speeches for him, engaged in some courtesy of United
States foreign policy in his big speech a year and three
months ago. He said that for 60 years the United States and
other western countries, sacrificed democracy for the sake
of stability and for Cold War constituents. It was a big
mistake, it was a policy that produced, in the long run,
over 60 years, a lot of anomalies, including so-called
Islamic militancy because religion became the only way to
fight the tyrants and getting away with it. The state could
not control hundreds of thousands of mosques and so the
mosque became a platform. In as much as it was the case with
the Catholic Church in Poland, it became a platform for
dissidents who wanted to get away with opposition to
Communism.
In the Middle East, the
mosque has played that role. And of course the outcome of
this was, among other things, 9/11. That the 19 people who
perpetrated the attacks on 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia and
Egypt--two countries that the United States has
befriended—Saudi Arabia for the last 33 years and Egypt for
the last 40 years is very telling. These are countries that
the United States befriended and supported, backing
tyrannical regimes. At the end of the day this produces
human beings who are angry and hostile, not only to their
own regimes, but also to the West which for so long has
backed and supported these regimes.
Q: One of the
other claims of the Bush Administration is the role that
the Iraq War has played in transforming the Middle East,
that it has served as a catalyst for democratic change. What
is your take on this?
A: Well, of course, the
Bush administration—having failed to produce weapons of mass
destruction or to establish a sort of a linkage between
Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda or 9/11—had to find something
else to legitimize their invasion of Iraq, which, happily
for me, is democracy. And I have to say that part of it,
even though it is the wrong pretext for war, is the right
thing for us: the democracy activists.
Removing Saddam Hussein has
definitely helped the democratic forces in the region to
feel that history is on their side and when I am asked about
the role of Bush in this regard I see his role are more like
a midwife for democracy. Remember, thousands, not hundreds,
thousands,
have been working for democracy for the last 40 years in
this region of the world, and Bush comes into this game—and
I am happy that he came—and his role is not unlike a midwife
for a region that was already pregnant with the yearning for
democracy and he
helped to deliver it, although by caesarean.
That is probably the
closest, the most vivid of analogies that we have to use. Am
I grateful to him? I am. Should we give credit to him for
democratic change in the region? No. That would be unfair to
people who died and people who went to prison and sacrificed
for human rights and for democracy.
You have to remember, Radio
Free America helped deliver democracy and freedom to Eastern
Europe and ultimately to the Soviet Union. And this has to
be acknowledged that there is a role for the West and in the
same way we have to give credit to the Bush administration
and to the Europeans who have been really working hard for
democracy in the Middle East.
Q: You’ve also
done a lot of work on Islamic thought and you mentioned
before that the history of democratic and liberal ideas in
the Arab world stretches back to the 19th
century. What do you see as the relationship or the affinity
between these progressive ideas in Islamic thought, and
those from western thought like the Enlightenment?
A: Like all relationships,
you would find, in Islam, a lot of strain and at a defense
of the alignment of political and intellectual forces
anywhere, you can push the freedom which goes back to the
Mutazillites in Islam. Most people don’t realize these were
free thinkers, many of them were persecuted by Caliphs and
they had to flee. People like Ibn Khaldun himself, moving
from one country to the other. So there is a conservative,
reactionary strain in Islam that has always favored people
in power. They will propagate a version of Islam that they
push as the status quo, fueled with tradition, if you knew
Arabic I could really say what phrase they use, and that is
“to put up with a tyrant, is better than division.” So they
call it in Arab tradition fitma
the would rather put up with a tyrant that allows tradition
(inaudible). And that would be the model of that strained
conservatism. Don’t stand up to resist rulers because they
may create division in tradition and they’ll set the Muslim
nation, or the umma,
back.
Q: But there is
also a skepticism of reason, if one thinks of al-Ghazali for
instance, of reason itself, a critique of the falsafa
tradition which was promulgating rational interpretation of
Islam and Islamic culture.
A: There were the three
strains in Islamic thought, and now I will over-simplify.
There were the free-thinkers, or the Mutazillites; a
conservative religious strain that was favored by the
Sultans; and there were the escapists or the Sufis and
figures like al-Ghazali. These three strains have been
preserved, and of course by the time you come to the 20th
century you find again an attempt to revive the rationalist
school with people such as al-Afghani and others. But very
quickly they were marginalized.
Q: Why were they
marginalized?
A: Because they were
pushing for reform of Islam.
Q: It was
political…
A: Yes. And this fits into
what we are trying to do now at the Ibn Khaldun Center. We
have one person there who is more of a Mutazillite, a free
thinker—and he is now leading the movement for Islamic
reformation. He has been influenced by many of the older
thinkers from Islamic philosophy, that older current, but
also from a more recent current, by thinkers such as Afghani
and Muhammed Abdul.
The big discussion now is
that Islam has not undergone a reformation.
Q: So there are
these two philosophical strains: reason on the one hand and
conservative reaction, fundamentalism, on the other. We
could see a figure like Sayyid Qutb as a figure of
reaction. What is balance of power in terms of influence in
the Islamic world between the two?
A: We are the weakest.
Those that are calling for an Islamic reformation are by
far
the weakest. However, our call is gaining in strength and
there is a realization now that there is a need for an
Islamic reformation. Right now we have 30 Islamic thinkers
who are meeting regularly, from Indonesia to Morocco. Our
last meeting was in October, in fact. The meeting was
broken into by some reactionaries as well as state security
thugs and was disrupted. They accused us of being heretics
and that we had no business talking about an Islamic
reformation, that Islam had no need of reform. The very idea
that Islam needs change or correction is an affront to them.
There is now one outfit in
Washington called the Joint Symposium on Islam and
Democracy, there is also the Ibn Khaldun Center in Cairo,
and there are others as well. And we are trying to bring
these people together into a network. So there is a movement
which is gaining in strength. But compared to the other two
forces of reaction, we don’t have the backing of the state
and we have no access to mass media. The radicals can use
thousands of mosques to preach, and the state can use the
mass media, but we have neither so it’s a problem.
Q: So according to
this network of scholars—what exactly would a reformed Islam
look like with respect to politics? In the west this began
with the push for the separation of Church and State…
A: That is exactly what the
Islamic reformers have enunciated. One cannot simply take
from the west; the reinterpretation of Islam that is
happening with this group of reformist scholars is also
important. They are good Muslim scholars and can debate any
technicality of religious law. They have come up with one
important proposition: that freedom is a central Quranic
value. From this, they are able to elaborate other values
like equality, gender equality, human rights, democracy; for
the separation between religion and the state. At the core
of this is the idea that religion and the state corrupt one
another—hence, their separation is vital for the survival of
both.
Q: This was
Luther’s argument as well…
A: Of course.
Q: One last
question. What do you think America’s role in future should
be in Middle East?
A: They should be
concerned, but from a distance. If they move too close,
then they will discredit us, the reformers and the human
rights activists and those pushing for democracy. What we
need for the United States to do now is to weaken their
support for the tyrants: for the Mubaraks, for the Abdullahs.
We can do battle with them on our own terms if they do not
have the backing and support of the United States or other
western powers.
Look at Egypt: they get $4
billion a year, $2 billion from the United States and
another $2 billion from Europe and Japan. This creates a
rentier state where there is no accountability for the state
to its people since it is supported from abroad. And they
can get away with more. Of course, there should not be
sanctions which only end up hurt the people. But the United
States should condition its financial support for different
countries on a timetable for genuine political and social
change. Enable democratic forces to have at least a stable
footing against the dictators. I don’t have access to a
newspaper, the maximum number of people I can get in my
Center is maybe 100 per week. So we need more support.
But things are moving. Not
as quickly as I would like, but gradually, and peacefully.
And that’s important: we don’t want violent change—like what
happened in Romania and Ceaucescu. The region has had enough
bloodshed. So we want to fight our battles peacefully, and
the United States and western powers can aid in this reform
for greater freedom and political reform. And I think
within five to ten years there will be major reform.
