Page 223 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

220 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

there is something in the Arab character, in the Arab historical tradition or in

the essential nature of Islam that militates against the adoption of Western
parliamentary forms of government. Nor is it a coincidence that in every Arab
country where constitutional government on the Western model has failed, the
constitutions subsequently introduced have declared the country to be an
Islamic state with thesharia as the basis of the law, which fact alone would serve

to render democratic government as we know it in the West an impossibility.
The one Arab country whose constitution contains no such provision, the
Lebanon, has paid the price for its singularity by being ravaged by civil and
confessional conflict, instigated and conducted by the Palestinian guerrilla
forces to whom it has afforded sanctuary, while the guerrillas themselves
have in turn been incited and supported by the more militant Islamic
republics.

Given the failure of representative and constitutional government in the
advanced Arab states, as well as its demise in most of Asia and Africa; given,
also, the progressive extinction of liberal democracy in all but a handful of
countries around the globe (and, indeed, the disappearance of civilized

government over large tracts of the earth), it would be absurd beyond measure
to expect any form of democratic government to emerge and flourish in the
political backwaters of Arabia and the Gulf. Were the potential revolutionaries
in the Gulf states ever to gain power (either through the feebleness and
imbecility of their present rulers, or by their own exertions), they would
promptly deny to their luckless fellow citizens any say in their own affairs, and

ruthlessly suppress any and all expression of discontent, as their like have done
elsewhere in the Arab world over the past twenty-five years or more. The
existence of a legally constituted opposition offering an alternative programme
of government is a sine qua non of parliamentary democracy. Without it, the
system is meaningless. Where, one might justifiably ask, is such an opposition

to be found in the Arab world today? Why therefore expect the Gulf shaikh-
doms, of all the Arab states, to prove the exception?
Should the present system of traditional and hereditary rule be swept away
in one or more of the Gulf shaikhdoms, presumably some form of republican
government would succeed it. What the exact nature of such a government
would be it is impossible to predict. A centralized bureaucracy under the

direction of a president, backed by the army and a widespread police network,
might serve to govern Egypt, but the peninsular Arabs are not the submissive,
patient and malleable people the Egyptians are. What are the alternatives at
present visible in the Arab world? A military junta, as in Libya, where Colone
Qaddafi holds his subjects in check with rifle and bayonet while bewildering

them with an incongruous blend of Islamic fundamentalism an quasi
socialism? A full-blown socialist state, run by a powerful engine of rePre^S10"’
as in Algeria? The authoritarian and semi-socialist prescriptions of the baatn,
wlich peoples of Syria and Iraq have been forced to swallow? Or the