Joshua Muravchik - Trailblazers of the Arab Spring
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Before September 11, 2001 we Americans did not think much about freedom or democracy in the Middle East. U.S. policy toward the region aimed to assure a reliable flow of oil, to encourage peace between the Arabs and Israel, and above all, during the Cold War, to prevent our rival from gaining any strategic advantage over us. 9/11 impelled us to reconsider.Now, as we are entangled in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan the Mid-Easts political and social quandaries lie at the very core of our foreign policy objectives. And yet, after years of blood and fortune spent on the democratization of the Middle East, the most identifiable personalities in the region are notorious terrorists, backwards autocrats and fanatical preachers. As Joshua Muravchik demonstrates in Trailblazers of the Arab Spring, there are in fact also heroic democrats and liberals in these lands of anti-democratic fanaticism, and the fight they are fighting is also our fight.Muravchik brings to light the stories of seven remarkable people, six Arabs and an Iranian. Five are men; two, women. Four are Sunnis, two are Shiites, and the seventh is mixed. All are devoted passionately to a cause, and, while the angles from which they attack it are varied, the larger goal is the same for all sevento make their countries more open and democratic. Trailblazers of the Arab Spring reminds us that freedom is a prize that must be won through struggle and sacrifice, and it introduces us to our anonymous friends who have consecrated their lives to the birth of free societies in the Middle East.
Joshua Muravchik: author's other books
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Joshua Muravchik
Joshua Muravchik
Joshua Muravchik
Joshua Muravchik
Christopher K. Lamont
Yakub Halabi (editor)
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Table of Contents
Foreword
This is a book about the people who are driving the most important revolution of the 21st centurythe insurrection against the despots who have been ruling Muslim-majority nations in the Middle East and North Africa.
Its a revolution that hardly anyone predicted, but, against all odds, in 2004, Joshua Muravchik set out, as he put it, to identify individuals in the Middle East who could make democracy possible. Josh (and I can call him that since Ive known him for 16 years, back to when we played together on the American Enterprise Institute softball team) will readily admit that he wasnt rushing to print because he thought the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak or Zin El-Abidine Ben Ali was imminent. But he recognized what few others did: There were brave, smart individuals working quietly and passionately, at home and in exile, to bring freedom to countries that had never known it.
What Josh wanted to show was that, scattered about Middle East communities, there were men and women who dreamed of living in a society that mirrored our own in terms of freedom, opportunity, and equal rights and who were devoting themselves at great risk to making this dream a reality. Their family histories, their sacrifices, their ideological origins, the roots of their motivationin fact, their very existencewere nearly unknown.
Why? One answer is that American policymakers were not unhappy with the status quo in the Middle East, and if there were democrats seeking change, hardly anyone in the West caredor noticed. That began to change, as Josh writes, after the attacks of 9/11, when policymakers acknowledged that the Middle East conflict between autocracy and democracy, like the conflict over the nature of Islam as a religion, was playing out on our own shores and that, ultimately, a freer Middle East would mean a safer world. During her confirmation hearings to be Secretary of State in 2005, Condoleezza Rice explicitly repudiated past policy: In the Middle East, President Bush has broken with six decades of excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the hope of purchasing stability at the price of liberty. The stakes could not be higher. As long as the broader Middle East remains a region of tyranny and despair and anger, it will produce extremists and movements that threaten the safety of Americans and our friends.
So, after 9/11, we had good strategic and moral reasons to recognize that Middle East democrats existed and needed to be nurtured. But the history of the Wests ignorance of what Josh calls the voices of democracy is more insidious. These voices were, after all, Arab, Persian, Kurdish, and the like, and our understanding of their culture, history, and politics was scant and informed by prejudice and myth. Part of that myth was that (despite the experience of Indonesia and Turkey) Muslims arent ready for freedom, or really dont want it, or havent absorbed enough 18th Century Enlightenment ideas to achieve it. In a speech to the National Endowment for Democracy in 2003, President George W. Bush said, In many nations of the Middle East ... democracy has not yet taken root. And the questions arise: Are the people of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty?... I, for one, do not believe it. This was a minority view at the time. It probably still is.
The Gdansk Shipyard may have seemed a bit exotic in 1980, but we could understand Polish workers rising against communism as they had done before. But who are people like Hisham Kassem, Mohsen Sazegara, Rola Dashti? Josh Muravchik knows them. He tells their stories.
This approachthe emphasis on the personalmay be unexpected for someone of Joshs background. He is a scholar of intellectual history, author of Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism, among other important books. But he chose here to present life narratives, and he does something Ive never encountered before: He allows us to see, from the inside out, how these Middle East democrats see the world and how they could risk everything for freedom despite (or perhaps because of) the traditions in which they were raisedin Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Palestine, Kuwait, and Syria.
The publication of the initial version of this book in June 2009 was prescient. Almost too prescient. The very month of publication, crowds swept through Tehran, protesting a fraudulent presidential election and spawning the Green Movement, the greatest threat to Iranian tyranny since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979. Then, on December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire, and protests forced Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali from power 28 days later. In what seemed a continual passing of the baton from one group of revolutionaries to the next, Mubarak fell in February 2011, and by autumn Muammar Qaddafi of Libya was dead, and Syria was aflame.
Josh realized he needed to add these more recent events to the story. The book you hold in your hands includes an absorbing account of the Arab Spring in the form of an epilogue and updates to the biographies of the seven subjects. All in their 40s or 50s, their often lonely voices found numerous echoes in the younger, computer-savvy generation, whose protests culminated in the demonstrations in the streets of Tunis, Cairo, Benghazi, and Deraa. Josh draws on his post-revolution trips to Tunisia and Egypt to recount these events and offer some well informed speculation about where it all may lead.
The Bush Institute wanted to co-publish this book in part because of President Bushs commitment to freedom, in the Middle East and around the world: Freedom is universal. People who do not look like us want freedom just as much.
When the Institute, the policy innovation arm of the George W. Bush Presidential Center on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, was launched in 2009, our very first program was something called the Freedom Collection. The original concept was to gather video histories from dissidents and freedom advocates, like Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republicmainly as an archive to encourage those who live in the United States and other free countries to support the spread of human freedom. We soon realized, however, that there was another vital audience: other dissidents and freedom advocates who were on the front lines in places like Cuba, North Korea, Burma, and, yes, many nations in the Middle East.
These personal histories of dissidents are critical for two reasons: First, they provide moral support to todays freedom advocates, who can understand their place in history and realize that they arent alone, and, second, they present practical solutionshow the Solidarity movement brought down communism in Poland, for example, or how the Dalai Lama drafted the free Tibetan constitution. We now have scores of such interviews, and we are using technology to make them available to dissidents in closed societies and others around the world. Joshs book fits the strategy of the Institute and our belief that it is personal stories that inspire, educate, and ultimately produce change. As Josh writes, The realization of democracy in the region depends on people like the seven whose stories are told in this book.
We wanted to co-publish for two other reasons as well. First, Josh Muravchik, who is a fellow in Human Freedom at the Bush Institute, is a serious scholar with a wide and deep background in both global and Middle Eastern politics and history. Second, he is that rare bird among international relations PhDs: a clear and graceful writer. But youll soon see that for yourself.
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