Another interesting piece from Mshari Al-Zaydi in Asharq Alawsat. Here, he looks at Fareed Zakaria’s book, The Future of Freedom and finds that Zakaria’s caution about confusing the ‘mechanisms of democracy’ and ‘democratic governance’. Simply following the form—as with elections—doesn’t result in a democracy, they say. Rather, there must be a willingness to put into practice the things that support the entire concept. Transparency, an independent and well-trained judiciary, press freedoms, human liberties of speech, thought, religion and the like are necessary to sustain what is capped by elections. Definitely worth reading.

A Different Kind of Democracy
Mshari Al-Zaydi

Amidst all this clamor in our region regarding elections, democracy and the issues that surround it, which we hear about almost everywhere in the Arab and Islamic worlds, from the elections of members of parliament to members of the local municipality, from the head of state to heads of faculties ─ despite all of this fruitless clamor, we should stop and confront the dilemma that is democracy in our miserable Arab world.

Perhaps the views of the American researcher and journalist Fareed Zakaria regarding democracy in the Arab and Islamic worlds may be provocative and uncomfortable for the advocates of democracy.

Zakaria believes that what is required in the Islamic and Arab worlds “is not more democracy, but less.” This is contrary to the well-known phrase reiterated by advocates of democracy in all its forms that the remedy for all problems with democracy is more democracy. I recall that the Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh used this phrase in commenting on a crisis that was taking place in his country.

Fareed Zakaria is a dedicated researcher and it is difficult to accuse him of bearing some kind of hatred towards Muslims since he is of Indian-Muslim origin. He has long considered the cause of the Islamic world’s opposition to real democracy even after the wave of democracy had swept over most countries following the fall of the Soviet Union.

This question is raised in Zakaria’s book, ‘The Future of Freedom,’ that was based upon an article published in the American Foreign Affairs journal in 1997. The book has since been translated into Arabic and was published last year in Cairo by the Al-Ahram Center for Translation and Publishing.

The basic idea of the book states that it is incorrect [to believe] that by merely adopting democratic rule in the Islamic world, its situation would be rectified and that it would cause its communities to adopt values upon which the idea of democracy was established. Furthermore, it would not mean that these communities would transform automatically, and not necessarily quickly, into societies that are governed by a clear-cut constitutional structure by adopting the solid foundation upon which the “mechanisms” of democracy were established.
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