Barrett Kalellis
Saturday, April 26, 2003

When Napoleon set out to conquer Egypt in 1798, he was advised to “offer a succouring hand to unhappy peoples, to free them from the brutalizing yoke under which they have groaned for centuries, and finally to endow them without delay with all the benefits of European civilization.”

Although the U.S.-led Coalition forces have far different motives than had imperial Napoleon to expand his empire in Egypt, we face similar challenges in bringing unfamiliar, and in many ways alien, values to Iraq.

Several commentators have pointed to the fact that for a stable Iraqi government to succeed, it will need the combination of a strong leader who can unite the disparate ethnic and religious factions in the country, buttressed by a founding set of constitutional principles with institutions of law based on them.

In addition, a commitment to a decentralized supply and demand market will nurture a middle-class entrepreneurship and private investment that might grow and flourish, allowing individuals economic freedoms to diversify the country’s wealth base, which is now primarily a large oil reserve.

This is a tall order, and the recent Shiite street demonstrations demanding Islamic dominance don’t bode well for the Bush administration’s call for a Western-style democratic government.

It can only be described as disheartening to witness thousands of benighted, uneducated and impoverished people whipped into a moblike frenzy, beating their heads and lashing their backs until they are red with blood — all the while calling for the U.S. to leave them alone so they can convert their country into a theocracy.

About 95 percent of Iraqis are Muslim, with Shiites constituting 60 percent of the population; the rest are mainly Sunni Muslims and Kurds.

Unlike Christianity, where government and personal religious belief have necessarily evolved side by side into separate institutions and spheres of authority, Islam permits no such bifurcation. According to Near Eastern scholar Bernard Lewis, in an Islamic state, “there is only a single law, the shari’a, accepted by Muslims as of divine origin and regulating all aspects of human life: civil, commercial, criminal and constitutional.”

Muhammed set up a system wherein ”the state was the church, and the church was the state, and God was head of both, with the Prophet as his representative on earth.”

In this system, there is no need for a corresponding secular government as in Christianity. Muslims have always resisted secular institutions from abroad, and do not distinguish between God and Caesar, like Christians.

When European influences began to reform much of Middle Eastern life, a distinction between modernization and Westernization was made. After noticing the secularization that took place in Egypt, in Turkey and in six former Soviet republics from exposure to Western practices, Muslim religious thinkers have construed Westernization a serious threat to their religion.

As a result, a strain of radical Islam has gained momentum and political power in Iran, Afghanistan and Sudan and is hell-bent on returning to the Holy Law of Islam and an Islamic order. We recognize these forces at play in varying degrees among disparate groups like al-Qaeda, the mullahs of Iran, Saudi-fomented Wahhabism and Palestinian terrorist groups.

At present, only Turkey, Lebanon and some of the ex-Soviet republics have been able to form secular governments in the midst of Muslim populations. All the rest that have constitutional governments have recognized Islam as the official religion.

The administration’s belief that a representative democracy as we know it can flourish in an Islamic society seems to fly in the face of lessons learned from a history of more than 14 centuries. Removing religion as the organizing principle of society, replacing it with a non-religious substitute, is totally foreign to Islam.

These reforms are viewed as exclusively Western, particularly U.S- and Israeli-inspired. Thus the vehemence we see in their denial.

Whether a free society can even exist in Iraq, or any other Middle Eastern country, depends in large part on how many freedom-loving individuals actually can be found in this part of the world. These are the people who will band together to demand the freedom to live their own lives, apart from the wishes of repressive rulers and corrupt governments, in a free and open society under a representative and responsible government.

The U.S. is committed to helping these latent freedom-seekers to find their voices in Iraq. Common sense suggests that this will be a long and arduous process; but one can only hope that freedom and tolerance will prevail.

Barrett Kalellis is a columnist and writer whose articles appear regularly in various local and national print and online publications. You may reach Mr. Kalellis at kalellis@newsmax.com.

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