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MAX BOOT REPORTS ON RECENT OPINION POLLS IN ISLAMIC NATIONS:
Muslim opinion also challenges jihadist orthodoxy that proclaims that giving power to the people, rather than to mullahs, is "un-Islamic." The latest Pew poll found "large and growing majorities in Morocco (83%), Lebanon (83%), Jordan (80%) and Indonesia (77%) — as well as pluralities in Turkey (48%) and Pakistan (43%) — [that] say democracy can work well and is not just for the West."
That's exactly what President Bush has been saying. Though his actions and rhetoric have been denounced as "unrealistic" and "extremist" by his American and European critics, it turns out that Muslims welcome it. "Roughly half of respondents in Jordan and nearly two-thirds of Indonesians think the U.S. favors democracy in their countries," the new Pew study said. "About half of the public in Lebanon also takes that view." Imagine that: Bush's actions might actually be making Middle Easterners more pro-American!
#1I suppose the Arab people want democracy. However, hate has become such a big part of the Arab world, that it would be hard to imagine a middle east with out prejudice against people of other faiths. In fact Fridman in his new book on the middle east says "this sort of the-Jews-control-the-world conspiratorial thinking is deeply embedded in Saudi Arabia - more deeply, in fact, than in any country I have ever visited." He then called anti-Semitism "one of the great debilitating factors in Arab political life today, the notion that the future is always being shaped by forces or groups outside the Arab's control, so they are never at fault for anything that befalls them."
I hope that someday this kind of thinking will not be in the psyche of Arabs in the middle east.
Michael
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#3Great points, Michael.
Democracy in Islamic nations will only work if large portions of the populations in those nations will turn thier backs on what the Qur'an says. This is very difficult for any but the liberal elites because the Muslim "man in the bazaar" holds that the Qur'an is trhe pre-existant, literal word of God handed to Muhammad by the Angel Gabriel. There is a great tendency in Islam towards fundamentalism (after all, how can you argue for various interpretations of the Qur'an when literalism is at the heart of Islam???) and it will require centuries of the kind of secularization that the West underwent after the Renaissance. I don't see it happening any time soon, in spite of what the more liberal Islamic scholars say.
Pomoze Bog.
Tsar Lazar