It is remarkable that in the reams — or should I say screams — of media coverage of the protests rocking West Asia, there is very little about the threat of the outbreak of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. Till relatively recently — indeed, perhaps, just before the Night in Tunisia — almost every Western analysis of any Muslim country carried varying and often significant overtones of Islamophobia. The currently decidedly supportive media coverage makes it clear that this page is turning, although it will take some time for the impact of several years of horrifyingly crude distortions of Islam to be unwound.
The good news is that the immediacy of electronic media tells the tale as it is — everybody could see there were almost no bearded and robed protestors on the streets in Cairo or Tunis, certainly on the first three or four days of the revolution. They were simply people protesting peacefully, demanding a better life and a more responsive government — not that different than, say, the hundreds of thousands of Tea Party protestors who had recently jammed Washington D.C. demanding that Mr. Obama change his policies.
While the analogy is certainly not exact — for instance, the Tea Party protest was orchestrated, while the Jasmine Revolution was not; the issues in West Asia were much more critical, sometimes having to do with life and death; and so on — the point is to recognise that Tunisians or Egyptians protesting their perceived injustices are, politically speaking, identical to Americans or English or French people protesting their perceived injustices.
One remarkable difference, however, was the sight of tens of thousands of Muslims praying side-by-side in Tahrir Square and then getting up and demonstrating against the government. This definitive distinction — between Allah, on the one hand, and the government, on the other — suggests to me that, sooner rather than later, more and more Islamic countries will become — like Turkey and Indonesia — simply countries with majority Muslim populations.
Another dramatic change that will be driven by the protests — particularly those in Bahrain — is to bring the different Muslim strands — Shia and Sunni — closer together. Sunnis, in Tunisia and Egypt, who have tasted tear gas and rubber bullets and worse — will surely identify much more with the Shias, who are suffering the same atrocities on the streets of Bahrain, than with Sunni rulers, whether in their own country or elsewhere.
Now, I am no serious student of Islamic history, but I think it is obvious that when there is a lot of awaaz about anything in the world, as there has been about Islam over the past thirty or forty years, it means that there is some deep-rooted change going on. The last fundamental change in Islam was in the 1920’s, when Ataturk defeated the Allies after World War I and converted the remnants of the Ottoman empire, which had been that the seat of Islamic knowledge and learning, into a secular nation.
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Islamic thinking and scholarship was relegated to the edges and slunk away to reappear, snarling defensively, in Wahhabi Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The culmination of this change was 9/11, which, to me, marked the high point — the dying gasps, in a manner of speaking — of Wahhabi fundamentalism and the beginning of the evolution of a new Islam.
A critical element of this evolution must be the softening of the hard edge between Shias and Sunnis. I recognise that this hard edge may simply be the result of politics, as most hard edges are, but politics, particularly if they have been perpetrated for generations if not centuries, create walls that need to be torn down.
And it is patently clear that this Jasmine Revolution is in process of doing just that.
Another positive that will come — indeed, is already coming out — of these horrifying events is a newer, more liberal outlook on the “Arab street”. The process of marching side by side with thousands of other people, all driven by the same impulse for change, always radicalises — or, at least, liberalises — mindsets. Talk to anyone in the West who marched for change in the 1960’s and the 1970’s. The true lesson of any protest that is genuinely grassroots is that we are all in this together, whether you wear a three-piece suit, a hijab or cutoffs and a T-shirt.
Of course, the cards are still being played out, and they will have huge geopolitical and economic implications. But I believe that when the tale is finally told, the real story will be that this glorious revolution in West Asia is the next step in the birth of a new, modern and yes, secular Islam.
Allah-o-akbar!