Last year, people across the "Arab world" were up in arms about the regimes in power in their part of the world, and decided that it was time to change.
It did not matter whether the leaders were like the extremely corrupt, but staunch Western ally, Hosni Mubarak, in Egypt, or the eternal Nemesis of the West, Mouammar Gaddhafi, in Libya.
They had to go. Period!
Well, as I have said many times before, getting rid of bad leaders is far easier than replacing them with good ones. Bad governance is more often than not replaced by equally bad governance. And democracy is absolutely no guarantee that things will get better, ask anyone in Greece if you want confirmation.
Anyway I do not know how many times that I have read articles in past few months which read that it was not Islam that was out on the street protesting, but activists for democracy. More liberal, less conservative religious thinkers would be the voice of the area after the Arab Spring!
Ho-hum. Anyone want to check the results of the last elections held in similar circumstances? See the first elections held in Bush's post-Saddam Iraq for example. The clear winners were the Shia religious parties. Check out the Palestinian elections won by Hamas.
Scepticism meets wishful thinking. Eventually, sadly, we have to come down on the side of scepticism.
So examine Egypt and the elections that followed the uprising last year. What did we get? No clear majority, but the biggest share went to the "Party for Freedom and Justice". This a fine sounding name (I would be interested to know if the translation from the original Arabic is correct, but anyway). Realise that they were founded by the less impressively named "Muslim Brotherhood" (also, incidentally, the parent of Hamas).
Freedom? That includes the right to dissent upon religious belief, and declare Islam to be just another load of superstitious junk that people can decry? And the freedom to eat a bacon sandwich and drink a glass of wine, maybe? I would hardly expect so.
Justice? Sharia Law maybe? Perhaps not for the moment as Egypt badly needs the large handouts that it gets from the West, so that probably that has to be put on hold - for the moment at least, it is hardly a selling-point that would go down well in Washington or Paris, or Berlin for that matter.
It looks like (for the moment, nudge, nudge, wink, wink), getting power is more important than absolutism for the Party of Freedom and Justice.
Which is more can be said for the party which came second in the poll (still no "liberal pro-western" thinking, and you have now used up 61% in total of the vote!). Al-Nour, an extremely fundamentalist Salafi Islamic fundamentalist party, finds the Party of Freedom and Justice too moderate (excuse me while I roll about on the floor laughing at the thought).
Until you get down to the "Egyptian Block" who got 13.4% of the vote, you really do not get out of this Islamist thinking at all. Not that the "Egyptian Block" would go down all that well in the USA - they are described on Wikipedia as "Social Democrats", and as "Socialism" is almost as dirty a word in the USA as "Islam" ....
Eventually reality might set in, and people in Egypt may realise that their well-being, as poor and mediocre as it is for many of the population, will only improve if the West continues to be as generous as it has been for some time. So the politicians may scrap their fundamentalism for a more "modernist" approach. Of course they could also follow the lead of Saudi Arabia and stick the proverbial one or two fingers (one for Germany, two for the UK) up at the West and continue down the road of religious pre-medievalism. The problem being that Egypt is not awash in oil and has three times the population. And has poverty on a vast scale.
Meanwhile, I wonder whether the Western media have woken up to the fact yet? When a full democracy votes, it often does not go down the road of enlightment, in fact the more entrenched superstition and fear are embedded in the thinking of the people, the more that superstition and fear get an entrenched political voice.
The Arab Spring may have demonstrated the right for people to wake up and shout down the gruesome dictators in their midst. Whether it has opened the door to a better future and better lives for the people, free from oppression and with a decent standard of living to match, is another matter entirely.
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