Editor,
Through its human and intellectual mass, Egypt became the heart and center of the contemporary Arab world.
Since 1952, Egypt has been setting the social, religious and political trends for the rest of the Arab world. When dictatorship precipitated a dark fog of misery in Egypt, the rest of the Arab world was engulfed by it as well. Suddenly, like the triumph of David over Goliath, a handful of peaceful anonymous youths, without any known common social, religious, or political affiliations, managed to turn off this dark fog machine.
It first happened in Tunisia and then in Egypt. They succeeded where old, better-organized parties ranging from the religious to the nationalist failed to accomplish for two generations.
It is fair to say that the seeds of this revolutionary hurricane sweeping the region started with the unprecedented but unsuccessful Iranian youths’ uprising after the tainted 2009 Iranian elections.
There, a new generation of educated, disenfranchised youths, pioneered the use of information technology, made possible by the Internet, as a potent weapon to drive a repressive regime to shoot itself and self-destruct.
Some are concerned that the Muslim Brotherhood may hijack this triumph to form an Iranian-like theocracy. Should that materialize, the Egyptian people, having gained the confidence to stand up to dictatorships, will topple that outcome as well.
The more probable scenario is a Turkish-like democracy. In Turkey, the ruling Justice and Development party which won two elections, evolved from a Muslim Brotherhood-inspired Islamist party called Fazilet Partisi. If the Muslim Brotherhood reforms along similar lines, then that is significant progress. There is a spreading consensus in the Muslim world that mixing politics and religion is a recipe for disaster that brings nothing but harm to Islam and the Muslims.
Some people circulate old falsehoods, like Muslims cannot handle democracy, despite that 75 percent of the 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide live under democracies.
Then there is the new argument that a democratic Arab world is bad for Israel.
Everybody knows that an affluent house in the midst of a poor and miserable neighborhood is less secure than a house surrounded by affluence. How is keeping millions of Arabs neighboring Israel in the shackles of hopelessness and misery better for Israel? A rarely mentioned fact is that 20 percent of Israeli citizens are Palestinian Arabs who have been content and productive citizens of Israel.
The only difference between those Palestinians and the Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank is the degree of freedom and affluence that they enjoy.
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America has been a beacon of freedom for the rest of the world. It would be a criminal betrayal to America to turn off this beacon just because a distressed ship is inhabited by Muslims.
Freedom is always good for all, because the collective wisdom of a nation is greater than the narrow wisdom of few egotistical dictators.
Sami Shakir
UNM alumnus
