Of course, in Syria Riad Turk is a brilliant example of Arab liberalism. Though he spent some two decades in prison for his communist convictions, I talked to him for four hours and he never once mentioned Marx or Lenin. He even criticized the Lebanese Democratic Left Party, with which I am close, because for him being of the left is not necessary at this historical moment; a democratic movement, he told me, was enough and more adequate.

To understand Arab liberalism, one has to understand not only what it now represents but where it emerged from: In Syria, it mostly comes from the remnants of the communist or Marxist left—just like the Eastern European dissidents of 30 years ago. In Saudi Arabia, it comes from the very heart of Islamic fundamentalist culture, but also from the orthodox Sunnis originating in the Hijaz, where the cities of Jeddah, Medina and Mecca are located. Hussein Shobokshi is a good example. It also comes from the Shiite minority in the oil producing Eastern Province. In Tunisia, it comes from the reformed Islamic university Al-Zaitouna. In Egypt, liberals are inspired by the great liberal tradition that was crushed by the late President Gamal Abdel Nasser.


We get our articles by email from practically every Arab country. Right now we have too many opinion pieces and are late in publishing what we receive. Most of the authors—we have more than 200—write exclusively for us; some send their articles to Arabic newspapers and to us, and we publish complete, uncensored versions. I believe we have something like 25 opinion articles from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates per week, a bit more from Egypt, and many more from Syria, which has a formidable civil society movement. Tunisians also contribute quite a bit, as well as Moroccans, especially Berber intellectuals, and Yemenis, Algerians, etc.

I am especially proud to say that, soon, half of our writers shall be women.

 Remember the novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch, where people open the palace doors to discover that the dictator has been dead for a long time? This applied to the Soviet Union and now to Arab dictatorships as well. Dictatorships are dead; they lost the ideological and moral high ground years ago. The battle is between fundamentalists and liberals. Liberalism is the wave of the future. The Middle East is not like Afghanistan, if only because of oil, and cannot be allowed to turn into a Taliban-led region. Since 9/11 both Afghanistan and Iraq have been liberated. This is the trend.

In the Arab world, much more than in the West, we can genuinely talk of a blog revolution. Arab culture has been decimated during the last 50 years. Arab newspapers are mainly under Saudi control. The book market is practically dead. Some of the best authors pay to have their books published in the order of 3,000 copies for a market of 150 million. This is ridiculous. Even when people write, they face censorship at every level—other than their own conscious or unconscious censorship. Meanwhile, professional journalism is rare.

 In the future, I would like Metransparent to promote tens (or even hundreds) of blogs representing human rights and activists groups in many Arab cities. This has already started.

Just to clarify a point about the Arab cultural scene. Freedom House writes a yearly report about the Arab world. It never mentions books. I have published official Iraqi censorship documents for the 1990s. Emile Zola, Agatha Christie, Shakespeare, Alexander Dumas, and tens of 19th-century Western writers were banned by Saddam Hussein. The list even included Learn English in Five Days. The whole of classical literature was banned by the Baathists.

Most liberals, at least among our writers, favored the U.S. military intervention in Iraq. I myself have written articles in support, before and after the invasion. I didn't support it because of Iraqi WMD, however, but for democracy. We would have liked President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair to say openly that they were invading to liberate the Iraqi people. Remember, even Riad Turk was not against the U.S. intervention. A Syrian, Abdul Razzaq Eid, who spent most of his life in the doctrinaire Syrian Communist Party of Khaled Bekdash, even wrote articles welcoming it. 

Things changed with the disaster that was Paul Bremer. The U.S. should have turned things over to the Iraqis immediately after liberation. Former Pentagon official Richard Perle was absolutely right about this point. Most liberals still believe the U.S. is serious about democracy, for reasons explained by Bush in his second inaugural address. Democracy in the Middle East has become a vital American interest. It's either democracy or many future Osama bin Ladens striking against U.S. interests. 

I admit some liberals took longer to overcome the Arab-Islamic taboo against approving foreign intervention. This is increasingly behind us. Yet, what Iraq proved was that the U.S. could not do the job alone. Internal democratic forces had to be mobilized. We are part of this "internal" process. I should add that outside intervention should not only be military. Ideally, we would like something like the Helsinki Accords, where the international community's relations with the Arab world involve spreading democracy, defending Arab dissidents, human rights, women's rights and minority rights. Syrian dissidents have been calling for this for years. Last year, Metransparent circulated a petition asking the United Nations to create an International Court to judge the authors of fatwas condemning people to death.

His remarks on "managing relations with the Islamists" are especially interesting. He's very much in favour of "co-opting Islamists::

(The major challenge for Arab liberals in the current year is) managing relations with the Islamists. They are the liberals' adversaries but also, in certain cases, their necessary partners. To take an example from a completely different context: In the 1980s, French President François Mitterrand co-opted the French Communist Party and accelerated its implosion. Saad Eddine Ibrahim in Egypt and Riad Turk in Syria are wagering on a similar development in the Middle East. You bring Islamists into the open, encourage them to take part in the political life of a country, and they are bound to disintegrate into their various component elements. For example, the leader of the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, Ali Sadruddin al-Bayanouni, recently opted for peaceful negotiations with Israel and even for a possible recognition of Israel. This would not go down well with other Syrian Islamists. Dissension shall occur over issues like this one and others. It is either this or the Assad and Mubarak regimes will last for a long time. The same applies tto Hamas. Co-opting Islamists is a risky proposal, of course. Where liberals should never make concessions is where Islamists tend to be harshest: the status of women. In that domain no concessions must be made.

Interesting web site. I'm still browsing through it but just thought I'd pass on a link to this article. Its rather long and very wordy with a slow start but well worth reading carefully.

Not much doubt that remnants of communism have either given up their leftism or decided to submerge within democratic revolution "for now", not just in middle-east but world-wide.

Isn't that a distinction without a difference? After all the communist manifesto was born in the democratic revolutions of 1848 and proclaimed the existence of a trend that sought to lead the democratic revolution.

I think there's a pretty strong tendency towards submergence in this web site too. But we don't have the excuse of living in societies where communism was suppressed by terror and the immediate tasks of the democratic revolution would not be assisted by communists establishing separate parties.

We live in societies where the democratic revolution was consolidated long ago and its way past time to move on.

Whats interesting about that web site is that a lively political and philosophical debate is unfolding in the course of the democratic revolution now sweeping the middle east. We need to achieve the same in the West, and introduce the communist perspective into it.

While the perspective of the article linked above is an odd mixture of strategic thinking about US policy, historical materialist social analysis and plain ordinary liberalism, what struck me as especialy interesting was its treatment of backward "Arab ideas".

On the one hand there is something elitist about it - the liberal appeal based on "universal principles" rather than mobiizing the masses led by the working class to fight for their interests. On the other hand there is something more authentically radical and revolutionary in the author's frank admission that he stands against the dominant ideas of his people.

Ongoing confusion about this may be central to the current non-existance of a communist left in the West. There is an overwhelming pressure to either capitulate to the dominant backward ideas of "the masses" or to forget that it is they and they alone who change the world and that the world is changing because they are changing it.