SEVEN OUT OF TEN of the least-free countries in the world have Islamic majorities. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, and Turkmenistan join Burma, Cuba, and North Korea in the dubious distinction of achieving the lowest possible ratings in the latest global survey of political rights and civil liberties put out by Freedom House.
The “democracy gap” between the Islamic world and the rest of the globe is the headline news in this year’s survey, published yesterday–not because it’s anything novel, but because people post-September 11 are paying attention. The pattern that has a non-Islamic state “more than three times more likely to be democratic than an Islamic state” can no longer be ignored.
The survey, produced every year since 1955, is the work of an in-house team of analysts, drawing on their own fact-finding missions and on the expertise of scholars, human rights activists, journalists, and political figures, with advice from a panel of leading political scientists. Bipartisan from the beginning, Freedom House was founded in the 1940s by Eleanor Roosevelt and, among others, Wendell Willkie, Republican challenger to FDR in the presidential election of 1940. Its mission is to advance the cause of democracy and oppose tyrannies of the left and right.
The picture the survey paints of the Islamic nations is not without nuance. It notes some limited favorable developments–some space for opposition parties and civil society in Jordan, the promise of a constitutional monarchy in Morocco, a referendum that ratified calls for political reform in Bahrain, and so on. And it points out that Islamic faith is not intrinsically incompatible with democratic values. If you add together “the large Muslim populations of such countries as India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey, and the Islamic populations of North America and Western Europe, the majority of the world’s Muslims live under democratically constituted governments.”
Nor should we assume, moreover, that the democracy gap is forever fixed. Religion, notes Freedom House, is not “an immutable factor in political change.” Half a century ago, when Spain and Portugal had right-wing dictators, and Italy was emerging from fascism, and Latin America was run by juntas, some doubted democracy could flourish in Catholic countries. How times change.
Still, the present challenge is gigantic: Not a single one of the 16 majority Arab countries is truly democratic or free. And the threat from fanatical Islamists gives weak regimes new excuses for holding onto the machinery of repression. The Islamists in turn are incensed by the success of the West. “Indeed,” write the authors of the survey, “the global triumph of the values of democracy and human rights may well be contributing to the irrational fury of revolutionary millenarians, who seek in a series of dramatic acts of evil to reverse history and supplant the natural human instinct for autonomy and dignity with an esoteric ideology of neo-totalitarian control masked in the language of religion.”
If confirmation be needed, while the analysts at Freedom House were putting the finishing touches on their survey, Bernard Lewis, the magisterial scholar of the Islamic world, was writing for the January 2002 Atlantic Monthly on the question “What Went Wrong with Muslim Civilization?” Why, that is, are the lands of Islam, once home to the most advanced civilization in the world, today “poor, weak, and ignorant”? The answer that Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton, distilled from a long career’s reflections: “the lack of freedom–freedom of the mind from constraint and indoctrination, to question and inquire and speak; freedom of the economy from corrupt and pervasive mismanagement; freedom of women from male oppression; freedom of citizens from tyranny.”
Claudia Winkler is a managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
