Hope on the Nile: Islam Does Not Have All the Answers

Not to grant him guru status or anything but I’m glad that Reuel Marc Gerecht has at last weighed-in on the Egypt Question. I’ve mentioned his writing before and think him one of the most interesting, and in some ways provocative, middle-east analysts. Even if you disagree with him, his ideas are worth serious consideration. His view that President Obama could usefully say “We are not scared of muslims voting” seems persuasive to me. So too his conclusion that it is time to “put an end to the West’s deleterious habit of treating the Middle East’s potentates respectfully and the Muslim citizenry like children.”

He writes:

Mr. Bush’s distastefulness helped to blind Westerners to the momentous marriage of Islamism and democratic ideas. Men and women of devout faith, who cherish (if not always rigorously follow) Shariah law increasingly embraced the convulsive idea that only elected political leadership was legitimate. Islam puts extraordinary emphasis upon the idea of justice — the earthbound quid pro quo that a man can expect in a righteous life.

This sense of justice, which Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani expressed so forcefully in 2004 against an American occupation fearful of letting Iraqis vote, has been irreversibly welded to the ballot box.