Does Christianity have a problem with Arab democracy?

In everything that has gone in over the past 18 months across the Middle East, the role of Christians has seemed either as absent or as victims of sectarian violence. To this UK-based armchair reader, the pressures for democratic change have seemed largely to not involve the Christian minorities, who have come to be associated more with the Arab spring turning into a ‘Christian winter’ of persecution: “What is striking about the tensions of recent months, however, is how old sectarian notes are sounding amidst the new symphony of freedom”, writes one commentator.

Against the instances of local churches being at the forefront of democratic change – most notably in the 1980s in Poland and the Philippines – what explains their relative inaction and silence? As minority groups in Muslim-majority countries, the positions staked out by the Christian churches in the Middle East seemed to have been a tradeoff of support and acquiescence with the regime in exchange for noninterference in church affairs, and an assurance of survival. A particularly timely recent paper by Fiona McCullum, published in Third World Quarterly (academic paywall), offers a broader way to understand these dynamics between the Christian churches, secular authoritarianism, and an Islamist opposition, as a form of ‘security guarantee’. Her conclusion, comparatively drawn from Egypt, Jordan and Syria:

“As long as the state is perceived as promoting tolerant policies towards the Christian communities, recognising their contribution to society and not condoning rhetorical or physical attacks against their presence, the churches are willing to accept limitations on societal freedom. The belief that Christians would be vulnerable to any regime change in the region, whether achieved through violent revolution or peaceful democratisation, has been an underlying factor in institutional backing of the status quo…In light of the challenge to the authoritarian model which has erupted throughout the region in 2011, church hierarchy support for the regimes reflects this assumption that the authoritarian status quo as preferable to democratic uncertainties.”

Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t? Is it – or will it continue to be – indeed a dilemma between organisational survival and an assertive proclamation of Christianity’s prophetic mission? A common theme in the obituaries of Coptic Pope Shenouda III when he died in March lay in how he had positioned the Coptic Church vis-a-vis the Mubarak regime, as the New York Times reflected:

“For most of his four decades as patriarch, Pope Shenouda managed a delicate balancing act, strongly supporting Mr. Mubarak in exchange for recognition of his role as the government’s primary interlocutor with the Copts. His close relationship with Mr. Mubarak followed a confrontation with his predecessor, President Anwar el-Sadat, who put Shenouda under house arrest to curb his vigorous advocacy for Coptic rights.

In choosing to support Mr. Mubarak, the pope was given a freer hand to strengthen the church without the state’s interference…The deep change that Pope Shenouda imposed on the post [of Pope] was how wise he was in dealing with explosive cases concerning Christian-Muslim sectarian fights — how wise he was in dealing with the state and the administration.”

As a result, have and are the Christian minorities in the Middle East finding themselves on the wrong side of history? And what if that history is pointing towards the Muslim Brotherhood? The tricky and uncertain challenge for Christians, as the NCR’s excellent John Allen puts it, lies in helping a transition from secular autocracy to secular democracy, that “democracy, the rule of law, and distinguishing religion from politics amount to a survival strategy. As one Arab Catholic recently put it, “In the Middle East, we don’t need liberation theology. We need liberation from theology.”

Democracy after the Arab spring: a lumper’s perspective

Was Francis Fukuyama right after all about the ‘end of history’, and the triumph of liberal democracy? Half a year on from the revolutions that the world came to call the Arab spring, the lumper in me is still trying to discern how these tumultous events, in what is proving to be a busy 2011, fit into our larger narratives about democracy past and future.

A series of recent articles helps to disentangle some of the issues here and place them in some bigger context. Is 2011 like 1991?  Two different takes both draw on the surprise that the rest of the world viewed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Arab spring, with requisite lessons for the future.

Susan Glasser at Foreign Policy considers the past two decades of post-Soviet Russia, summed up in a simple, yet complex sentence: “Where revolutions start is not always where they end up. ” Strongman politics, an economy built around resource-extraction, an assertive foreign policy have made Russia in 2011 a rather different place from the democratic, Western-friendly Russia anticipated with the end of the USSR.

In a piece written in February, Mary Kaldor from the LSE points to the emergence of a civil society in Egypt and Tunisia – which like in the Soviet republics, was underappreciated and appeared largely invisible to outsiders:

“What we are seeing in Tunisia and Egypt and across the Middle East is the power of civil society. The people in the streets are proving that western orientalist attitudes, the arguments of western governments about Arab exceptionalism, are simply wrong…Those of us who were engaged with opposition groups in Central and Eastern Europe expected something to happen although we did not know how or why. The same is true in Egypt. The youth groups who have coordinated the protests have not sprung from nowhere.”

Her warning, however, is that in the wake of revolution, economic liberalisation instead reversed the democratic gains of the east European revolutions, and could do the same in Egypt and Tunisia. None of these societies operate in isolation, and how the character of their interactions with Western countries change as a result of their revolutions sets the parameters for what comes next:

“Despite their failure to predict the 1989 revolutions, those same western governments assumed that that they knew best how to manage the transition to democracy. They imposed a neo-liberal formula of privatisation, budget cuts, and liberalisation. Former communist elites were able to exchange their political positions for material wealth while the majority came to associate democracy with deprivation and inequality – ‘we got banks instead of tanks’ said young Hungarians.”

Finally, a recent Economist issue considers the trajectory that the combination of Islam and democracy seem to be taking.

“With every year that has passed since al-Qaeda’s attacks on America in September 2001, it has become more fashionable to argue that something about Islam makes it hard to reconcile with full-blown liberal democracy—in the sense of a political system where all citizens have an equal right to vote, and are equal in other basic ways. And with equal vehemence, Muslims have retorted: there is nothing in their faith which precludes a liberal democracy, and much which works in its favour…

“In most understandings of liberal democracy, penal and civil codes are a matter for the people’s freely elected representatives to decide, within the confines of a humanly drafted constitution. How can that possibly be reconciled with the notion that such questions have been settled for ever by divine revelation?”

In the wake of the Arab spring – and the still-violent situations in Libya and Syria – our narratives about democracy face a reconfigured future. Are these societies actually on the road to lasting democracy? What will the impact of post-revolution Western involvement be? And how will these societies navigate their way between liberal democracy and political Islam? What was it again that Zhou Enlai supposedly said about the French Revolution? “It’s too soon to judge”.