The Sequester and the Arab Spring. By Andrew C. McCarthy. National Review Online, March 2, 2013.
McCarthy:
Like
the sequester molesters, “Arab Spring” devotees have their own fantasy
vocabulary. The whoppers are “freedom” and “democracy,” the ideals, we’re told,
that have swept the Middle East, even as it sinks into repression, social
unrest, and the persecution of religious minorities. Islam and the West use the
same words, but we are not conveying the same concepts — just as a “cut” in
your budget means something very different from a “cut” in Washington’s.
Freedom? “Let it be known to you
that the real meaning of freedom lies in the perfection of slavery,” explained
al-Qushayri, a celebrated eleventh-century scholar of Islam.
I offer
this bit of Islamist wisdom as an explanation, not a put-down. Not that the
distinction matters much. As Spring Fever
makes clear, the culture of Middle Eastern Islam is convinced of nothing so
much as its own superiority. It does not judge itself by non-Islamic standards,
particularly the standards of Western civilization, with which it sees itself
in a conflict that will end only when one side prevails.
The
dynamic, classical, supremacist Islam of the Middle East teaches that Allah has
given mankind, His creation, the gift of sharia: the “path,” the all-purpose
societal framework — covering all aspects of life, not just spirituality — for
living in dignity through obedience. “Freedom,” in this context, is to make the
“free” choice to surrender oneself entirely to this path.
That is
the antithesis of a freedom to chart one’s own course, the freedom of the West.
Here, Allah is not the sovereign. Our faiths may guide us, but the people are
sovereign, with a right to govern civil society as they see fit — including in
contradiction of sharia’s provisions, which deny what the West sees as basic
civil rights.
Thus
the folly of Arab Spring apologists, who envision a new generation of Muslim
rulers, popularly elected and thus — the fable goes — responsive to the needs
of their “constituents.” Responsive government, however, is the hallmark of
societies in which freedom means self-determinism.
In the Muslim Middle East, it is foolish to speak of “constituents.” The
ruler’s fidelity is not to the people but to Allah. It is for the people not to
dream but to obey, as long as the ruler is faithful to sharia. They don’t enjoy
the prerogative of deviating from the path.
“Accommodation,”
like “constituents,” is a term that echoes through the Arab Spring. Sharia must
be accommodated — given pride of place in the Middle East and growing deference
in the West. “Accommodation” turns out to be Arab-Spring for “balanced
approach,” the oh-so-reasonable packaging of an idea that is actually perverse.
Almost
never do we hear that federal law must accommodate, say, the law of Tennessee.
When people’s principles are the same, their legal systems — a reflection of
their notions about right and wrong — will mesh easily. When there is a
conflict, it is not because of a lack of accommodation; it is because either
the federal government or the state government is in error. We don’t
accommodate error; we correct it, either in the legislature or in the courts.
Calling
for “accommodations” is a polite way of saying that cultural values and the
legal systems they create are incompatible. When a culture cedes ground to a
different culture’s antithetical principle — when, for example, we are told
free speech must “accommodate” sharia blasphemy laws that proscribe negative
criticism of Islam — that is not a reasonable compromise. It is a corruption of
the good. That is how a culturally confident society sees it.
There
is a reason why the Islamic supremacists who run the Organization of Islamic
Cooperation insisted in 1990 on having their own “Declaration of Human Rights In Islam.” The purportedly Universal Declaration of Human Rights, written by non-Muslim diplomats after the Second
World War, does not work for them. Islamist leaders understood that Western
concepts of civil rights and human rights do not jibe with sharia. They wanted
their own declaration, reflecting their own very different aspirations.
Neither
does “democracy” work for the Islamists on the rise across the Middle East — at
least, not as we understand it in the West. For us, democracy is not a process
but a way of life, a worldview implying basic assumptions about liberty and
equality. To the Islamic supremacist, “Democracy is just the train we board to
reach our destination,” as Recep Tayyip Erdogan, now Turkey’s prime minister,
put it in 1998 when he was the mayor — or, as he referred to himself, the imam — of Istanbul.
The
destination Erdogan had in mind is power. Not the empowerment of free people
that is the genuine augur of spring. The power of the “Arab Spring” is the
imposition of perfect slavery.
