Contemporary Middle Eastern Islamic activism, in the form of political movements that declare Islam as their point of reference, finds its roots in 18th Century revivalism. Invariably, all contemporary Islamist projects in the region spring from or have been influenced by the movement of Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1791) who campaigned, and then embarked on a jihad, to cleanse Islamic faith and practice in Najd, his Arabian homeland, from impurities and bida’ (pl. of bid’ah -- an illicit accretion to ‘aqidah, faith, or ‘ibadah, worship).

These contemporary Islamic movements have, to a lesser extent, been influenced by two other major 18th Century efforts at revivalism; the first in the Indian sub-continent by Shah Wali Allah al-Dehlavi (1703-1762) and the second in Western Africa by Uthman bin Fudi (or Usuman dan Fodio) (1754-1817).

While the Arab movement was characteristically anti-Sufi, the Indian and African endeavors emanated from within well-established Sufi traditions. In the first case Sufism was deemed the enemy while in the other two cases it was the vehicle of reform itself. Despite this major distinction, the three revivalists sought to reform Islam from within and had clearly been responding to entirely domestic challenges. In their assessment, deviating from the true path of Islam and losing the essence of its pristine monotheistic faith were the principal causes of decline and backwardness. Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab’s concern was to fight the deviant semi-paganist form of Islam claimed by the scholars of the day. Al-Dehlavi’s concern was to shield India’s Islam against a rising tide of Hindu influence, and Bin Fudi’s struggle was aimed at salvaging Africa’s Islam from the encroachment of an animism that had already appealed to the ruler and ruled alike.

To Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab politics mattered only in as far as it impacted on his mission; that is, only to the extent that his campaign was hampered or assisted by the powers that be. He did not seem to have any political ambitions and had shown no interest in how government was run provided the governor espoused his ideas of ‘reform’ and embarked on a jihad to enforce them. His first encounter with political authority was the offer of protection made to him by the ruler of al-’Uyaynah, his home town to which he returned after years of exile. He married al-Jawharah, the ruler’s aunt and that seemed to serve him well as a source of political empowerment. However, the Najd ulama (scholars) were alarmed by his rising influence and managed to convince the ruler to end his support for him and even ask him to leave town. It was then that he sought refuge in al-Dir’iyah at the invitation of its ruler Muhammad Ibn Saud. Following two years of appeals, through letters, to the rulers of neighboring regions, inviting them to join his movement, he decided, in1746, to wage jihad in alliance with his protector Ibn Saud against those who opposed the Wahhabi teachings. Clearly, Ibn Saud was the political animal and an ambitious king in-the-making. The death of Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab in 1791 did not stop the expansion of the new Saudi state, which was able, in a relatively short period of time, to expand all the way to Mecca and Medina, which were captured from the Ottomans in 1805 and 1806, respectively.

The current vilification campaign waged by liberal circles against Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab and ‘Wahhabism’ because of the assumed association with radicalism, or more frequently what has become known as ‘Islamic terrorism’, is not new. It goes all the way back to the Ottomans’ endeavor to discredit the movement that snatched Al-Hijaz from them -- the home of the two holiest Muslim places on earth. In fact the Ottomans could do very little about it themselves and had to commission their own rebel Muhammad Ali, who had just liberated Egypt from Napoleon and claimed it to himself, to re-conquer Hijaz on behalf of the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul. Muhammad Ali sent his son Ibrahim to crush the expanding Wahhabi movement in Arabia between 1811 and 1819. He almost exterminated them and chased them all the way to their original power base in Najd; few people thought they would resurface again.

The Wahhabis had been oblivious to the challenge posed to Islam and the Muslims by the rising European powers. They had been jubilantly preoccupied with conquering Arabia when Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) was invading Egypt between 1798 and 1801, thus dealing a humiliating blow to the Muslim Ummah rather reminiscent of the Crusades more than five centuries earlier. It was inevitable that the contact with a superior and conquering Europe provoked debate over the cause of Arab and Muslim decline and the role played by religion. Muhammad Ali, perhaps unwittingly, is said to have initiated the debate within intellectual circles in Egypt, and to a lesser extent in other parts of the Arab world, over the causes of Muslim decline in contrast with to rise of Europe. As part of his desire to import from Europe what he believed was greatly needed in Egypt, he dispatched of students and professionals to France.

A close associate of Muhammad Ali was Sheikh Hasan Al-Attar (1766-1835), who at the age of 32 had been through the devastating moments of Napoleon’s invasion. His initial response to the French conquest was to flee Cairo and seek refuge in Upper Egypt. A few months later he returned to Cairo and became acquainted with some of the leading scientists and intellectuals, who accompanied Napoleon in his campaign, learned from them some of their sciences and taught them Arabic. From that moment onwards Al-Attar joined the quest for modernisation and hoisted the slogan 'our countries must change their conditions and acquire the sciences not available yet to them.' It was Al-Attar who recommended to Muhammad Ali to send to France his own disciple and loyal friend Rifa’ah al-Tahtawi (1801-73) as a guide and an imam, of the students.

An Al-Azhar scholar himself, Tahtawi was advised by his mentor to make the best use of his mission to France as a religious guide for the group of army cadets who had been dispatched to learn French sciences and acquire modern military technologies. He told him to observe well what he sees or encounters and to note down his observations. Tahtawi, a scion of a scholarly family, heeded the advice and threw himself into study with enthusiasm and success. He acquired a precise knowledge of the French language and read books on ancient history, Greek philosophy and mythology, geography, arithmetic and logic and, most importantly, the French thought of the 18th Century -- Voltaire, Rousseau’s Social Contract and other works.

Returning home after five years, Tahtawi could not help but express his admiration of what post-revolution France had accomplished. His admirers insist that this was in no way a blind infatuation. His French experience enabled him to diagnose the illness of the Ummah as being due to the lack of freedom. He suggested multi-party democracy as a remedy. At the same time, he criticised those who opposed the idea of taking knowledge from Europe saying: 'Such people are deluded; for civilisations are turns and phases. These sciences were once Islamic when we were at the apex of our civilisation. Europe took them from us and developed them further. It is now our duty to learn from them just as they learned from our ancestors.' Tahtawi is said to have been the first to campaign for interaction with the European civilisation. Being an Islamic scholar, he insisted that such interaction should aim at borrowing elements not in conflict with the established values and principles of the Islamic Shari’ah.

In 1834, shortly after his return to Cairo from Paris, Tahtawi published his first book Takhlis al-Ibriz Ila Talkhis Bariz. The book summarised his observations of the manners and customs of modern France, and praised the concept of democracy as he saw it in France and as he witnessed its defense and reassertion through the 1830 revolution against King Charles X1. Tahtawi tried to show that the democratic concept he was explaining to his readers was compatible with the law of Islam. He compared political pluralism to forms of ideological and jurisprudential pluralism that existed in the Islamic experience2.

From then on, almost all nineteenth century Islamic reformists in the Arab region took up the issue of political reform as a prerequisite of overcoming decline and backwardness. It had become increasingly apparent that ‘despotism’ was a major source of ‘Muslim sicknesses’. It had also become clear that the remedy is not to be found only within but should be sought elsewhere as well. Khairuddin Al-Tunisi (1810-99), Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani (1838-97), Abd Al-Rahman Al-Kawakibi (1854-1902), Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) and Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865-1935) followed Tahtawi in stressing that Muslims could benefit from European successes without undermining Islamic values or culture.

Khairuddin Al-Tunisi was the leader of the nineteenth century reform movement in Tunisia. In 1867, he formulated a general plan for political and administrative reform in a book entitled Aqwam al-Masalik fi Taqwim al-Mamalik (The Straight Path to Reformation of Governments). He appealed to politicians and scholars to explore all possible means to improve the status of the community and develop its civility, and cautioned the general Muslim public against shunning the experiences of other nations on the misconceived basis that all the writings, inventions, experiences or attitudes of non-Muslims should simply be rejected. He called for an end to absolutist rule, which he blamed for the oppression of nations and the destruction of civilisations3. In his search for the causes of decline in the Muslim world, Jamal Ad-Din Al-Afghani diagnosed that it was due to the absence of ‘adl (justice) and shura (council) and non-adherence by the government to the constitution. One of his main demands was that the people should be allowed to assume their political and social role by participating in governing through shura and elections. Al-Afghani attributed the decline to despotism, which is the reason as to why thinkers in the Muslim countries of the Mashriq (Arab East) could not enlighten the public about the essence and virtues of republican government4.

Muhammad Abduh believed that Islam’s relationship with the modern age was the most crucial issue Islamic communities needed to deal with. In an attempt to reconcile Islamic ideas with Western ones, he suggested that maslaha (interest) in Islamic thought corresponded to manfa’ah (utility) in the Western thought. Similarly, he equated shura with democracy and ijma’ with consensus. Addressing the question of authority, Abduh denied the existence of a theocracy in Islam and insisted that the authority of the hakim (ruler) or qadi (judge) or that of the mufti was civil. He demanded that ijtihad be revived because 'emerging priorities and problems, which are new to Islamic thought, need to be addressed.' He was a proponent of the parliamentary system. He defended pluralism and refuted the claims that it would undermine the unity of the Ummah. He argued that the European nations were not divided by it. 'The reason,' he concluded, 'is that their objective is the same. What varies is only the method they pursue toward accomplishing it5.'

Abdurrahman Al-Kawakibi (1849-1903) wrote two books on the subject, Taba’i’ Al-Istibdad (The Characteristics of Tyranny) and Umm-ul-Qura (The Mother of Villages). The first is dedicated to defining despotism and explaining the various forms it may take, with much of the discussion focused on political despotism6. In his other book, Al-Kawakibi constructs a series of dialogues involving fictional characters, which he describes as thinkers, each belonging to a known town in the Muslim world. He imagines that these prominent figures are summoned to a conference organised in Umm-ul-Qura (Mecca) during the haj (Pilgrimage) season to discuss the causes of decline of the Muslim Ummah. The conferees finally agree that progress is linked to accountability while regress is linked to despotism7.

Muhammad Rashid Rida believed that the cause of the Ummah’s backwardness was the loss by the Muslims of the truth of their religion. Bad political rulers, he explained, had encouraged this. True Islam, he added, involves two things, acceptance of tawhid (the creed of monotheism) and shura (council) in matters of state. But despotic rulers, he lamented, have tried to make Muslims forget the second by encouraging them to abandon the first. He stressed that the greatest lesson the people of the Orient can learn from the Europeans is to know what government should be like8. The significance of Rida is that it was out of his circle that Hasan Al-Banna (1906-1949) founder and first spiritual guide of Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimun (Muslim Brotherhood) emerged. It is believed that the link Rida had with both the Wahhabi and Afghani salaf’ schools of thought is the source of the special ‘salafism’ that Al-Banna’s movement upheld and promoted, a ‘salafism’ that combines aspects of Wahhabism and Sufism. This may explain, at least partly, why Al-Banna’s influence, and that of the movement he founded, has been global and instrumental in effecting revival across the Muslim world.

Born in Mahmudiyah near Alexandria, Hasan al-Banna, from his youth onwards, took part in the Hasafiyah Sufi order with his friend Ahmad al-Sukkari. After attending the Damanhur teachers’ training college (1923-1927) he went to Dar al-’Ulum in Cairo, founded by Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905) and made famous by Muhammad Rashid Rida, who taught there until his death in 1935. Al-Banna’s exposure to European thought was modest; while a student, he read Spengler, Spencer and Toynbee. In September 1927, he began teaching at a primary school in Isma’iliyah, the headquarters of the British garrison. While on the job, he wrote for the Cairo Muslim Youth magazine Al-Fath and pursued his relationship with Rida’s al-Maktabah al-Salafiyah group and with his scholarly journal Al-Manar, which Al-Banna edited from 1939-19419. In March 1928, al-Banna and six of his friends founded a 'religious association devoted to the promotion of good and rooting-out of evil,' a branch of the Hafsiyah Sufi order. By 1929, the organisation was already being referred to as Jam’iyat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun in the Al-Ahram newspaper, where a photograph of the group was published. The growth of the movement, which shifted to Cairo in 1933, was rapid: 4 branches in 1929; 15 in 1932; 300 by 1938; more than 2000 in 1948. By 1945, it had half a million ‘active members’ in Egypt. Between 1946 and 1948, branches were opened in Palestine, Sudan, Iraq and Syria.

The genius of Al-Banna manifested in his ability to take the concerns of the intellectuals of his time and the reformists that preceded him to the people. Working not from mosques or cultural clubs but from café shops and popular meeting places, he reiterated in simple and direct terms the calls for reform made by reformers of the 19th century. On colonialism, he echoed Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani and Mustafa Kamil (1874-1908); on riba (usury), Abduh and Rida; on the influence of foreign companies, M. Kamil; on intellectual chaos and loss of moral values, Abduh and Rida; on blind imitation of the West, Afghani and Shakib Arsalan (1869-1946); on man-made laws that fail to curb crime or deter criminals, Arsalan; on mismanagement of education, Abduh; on signs of desperation and loss of will, Arsalan and Kamil10.

But Al-Banna was the first to condemn partisan divisions and express a rather negative opinion vis-à-vis the political parties of his time. His priority had been to mobilise public opinion against the threat of British control not only of Egypt but also of much of the Muslim World at that time. He held the European powers responsible for ‘dismembering the Islamic Empire and annihilating the Islamic State and erasing it from the list of powerful living states.’ His movement’s goals were: first, to free the Islamic homeland from all foreign authority; and, second, to establish an Islamic state within this Islamic homeland. Emphasising the concept of one Ummah was, therefore, of paramount importance. He believed that political parties were a threat to the unity of the Ummah. Islamic analysts have had different opinions as to the real reason behind his rejection of political pluralism despite standing, or trying to stand, twice for parliamentary elections as an independent candidate. Some attribute this to the corruption and disloyalty that allegedly afflicted the leaderships of political parties during this time. Some others believe that the thirties were the years when Third World liberation movements believed in the viability of the single party system. Fascism, it is argued, was the model most liberation movements looked up to.11

Three years after the assassination of Al-Banna in 1949, a single-party government took over in Egypt in what seemed initially a dream coming true. However, as elsewhere in the region, the struggle for liberation from European colonialism ended up with a ‘territorial’ state that fell well short of the dreams and aspirations of the freedom-fighters. Despotic ‘republics’ or ‘absolute monarchies’ replaced the colonial authorities in most of the Arab countries. Throughout the post-independence era, Islam, its culture and its heritage came under savage onslaught in the name of modernisation. The Al-Azhar of Egypt was turned into a secular university, the Tunisian Az-Zaytouna Institute was closed down, awqaf (endowment) institutions were nationalised, Shari`a courts were either dissolved or marginalised and political parties and non-governmental organisations were banned or outlawed. The Ikhwan, who had already established branches or strong links in many Arab and Muslim countries, were hit hard by Nassir in Egypt soon after he came to power in 1952. Following the execution of several of their leaders and the imprisonment of hundreds of their followers in 1954, they were driven underground. The challenge had once again changed form. It was no more the challenge of the struggle for independence and freedom, but rather of the struggle to resist what was perceived as a pernicious onslaught against Islam and the cultural identity of the Ummah this time not by foreign colonial powers but by post-independence ‘national’ regimes. From then until the early seventies affiliates of the Islamic movements in the Arab region were influenced mainly by the works of Maududi and Sayyid Qutb.

Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), who was imprisoned for 10 years in 1954 and then executed in 1966 had only joined the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt after the assassination of its founder Hasan Al-Banna but had soon become the leading ideologue of the group and for no less than 30 years from the mid-fifties to the mid-eighties. Prior to his fame as an Ikhwan ideologue he was a renowned literary critic, novelist and poet. Most of his earlier writings were in fiction, literary criticism and poetry. He belonged to the prestigious circle of Taha Hussein, Abbas al-’Aqqad and Ahmad al-Zayyat, all three of them were modernists who had influenced him. But Qutb later turned against al-’Aqqad for his overtly intellectualised writings and against Taha Hussein for his Western orientations. In 1948, he was dispatched by his government’s Ministry of Education to the U.S. to study Western Methods of Education where he studied at Wilson’s Teachers’ College for three years until 1950. On his way back from the U.S. he toured Britain, Switzerland and Italy arriving back home in 1951. It is believed that his experience in the U.S. was a defining moment for him. His interest shifted from literary and educational pursuits to intense religious commitment. Without denying America’s scientific progress, he disliked its racism, sexual permissiveness and pro-Zionism. Upon returning home, he refused to work at the Ministry Education while declining an offer of promotion. Instead, he started writing articles for different publications on issues of society and politics.

Upon joining the Ikhwan in 1953, he was appointed editor of their publication Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun. He then became the director of the Ikhwan’s Media Section and soon afterwards he became a member of the Ikhwan’s Guidance Council and Executive Committee, the two highest bodies in the organization. Winds of change blew when a dispute erupted between the Ikhwan and Egypt’s ruler Gamal Abd Al-Nassir over the 1954 withdrawal treaty with Britain. The Ikhwan condemned the treaty for granting Britain the right to re-deploy its troops in Egypt within seven years should its interests be threatened. They demanded a plebiscite on the agreement to the displeasure of the government. In October 1954, an assassination attempt was made on the life of Nassir, who used the occasion to hit hard at his former allies and present adversaries.

Qutb had initially been imprisoned for three months in 1954. As a result of severe torture he was transferred in May 1955 to the prison’s hospital and was released due to bad health only to be rearrested in July 1955 and sentenced to 15 years most of which he spent in hospital. While in prison he witnessed the persecution of his colleagues. He was particularly affected by the Turrah prison massacre in 1957 when 10 of his ‘brothers’ were killed and many more injured as prison guards opened fire at them in their cells. That is believed to have been the moment when he started thinking of the creation of a disciplined secret cadre of devoted followers. His initial objective was self-defense but later he expressed the belief that the Ikhwan had the right to resort to force to respond to state violence. The culmination of his theory was the belief in the use of violence against the unjust state that refuses to alter its behavior. Upon an appeal for clemency by Iraqi President A. Arif, he was released from prison in 1964 only to be rearrested in August 1965 and charged with terrorism and sedition.

The detention, torture and execution of leading Islamic activists in Egypt created reaction that led to rejection of all else but what was considered pure Islamic means and methods. Democracy and all it entailed was deemed alien and un-Islamic and ‘the other’ had become the enemy. Such rejection was based on the categorisation of modern societies, including those in majority-Muslim countries, into Islam and jahiliyah as asserted by Sayyid Qutb in the book for which he was executed Ma’alim Fi Al-Tariq (Mile Stones). Some young members of the Ikhwan in prison could not accept that those who were torturing them to death were Muslim. They came to the conclusion that no form of peaceful coexistence would be legitimate, even if allowed, with such jahili rulers who have claimed for themselves God’s hakimiyah (sovereignty), another term introduced by Qutb in his book. It was some of these young dissenting Ikhwan that later on created some of the most radical and violent groups in the modern history of Islam. Incidentally, both hakimiyah and jahiliyah were borrowed by Qutb from Maududi’s earlier writings.
It took nearly two decades for the Islamic movements in the Arab region to reconsider their positions vis-à-vis democracy and political pluralism and to re-read Sayyid Qutb with a critical mind. This development coincided, or perhaps was encouraged, by what seemed to be a general inclination of Arab governments toward political liberalisation. It also coincided with the emergence of a new breed of Islamic thinkers, some of whom were leading figures in the Islamic movements and some were independent scholars. However, the greatest impact on Islamic movements in the late seventies and the early eighties had come from a group of former leftist thinkers who, upon the defeat of the Arabs in 1967, decided to shift from the nationalist camp to its Islamic counterpart. Some of the biggest names in contemporary Islamic political thought, such as Tariq Al-Bishri, Muhammad Amarah, Abdul Wahhab Elmessiri, Rachid Al-Ghannouchi and Munir Shafiq, to name a few, had at one time been nationalists or Marxists.

However, one very influential figure from within the Islamic circle has been Malik Bennabi (1905-73). Credited with having laid the foundation of the contemporary Islamic democratic school of thought, Bennabi, an Algerian thinker of French culture, believed that the coming of Europe had enabled the Muslims to escape from their decadence - caused by a mind incapable of thinking amid moral paralysis - by breaking up their rigid social order and freeing them from belief in occult forces and fantasies12. From the early 1950s until his death, he wrote and lectured on what he believed to be the grand issues: civilisation, culture, concepts, orientalism and democracy. In a lecture entitled `Democracy in Islam' delivered in French at the Maghreb Students Club in 1960 -- attended by Rachid Al-Ghannouchi who later co-translated it into Arabic by him -- Bennabi attempted to answer the question ‘Is there democracy in Islam?’ He pointed out that defining the concepts of ‘Islam’ and ‘democracy’ in a conventional manner would lead to the conclusion that, with respect to time and space, the connection between the two is non-existent. He suggested that deconstructing the concepts in isolation from their historical connotations and re-defining democracy in its broadest terms, without linguistic derivatives and free from any ideological implications, would lead to a different conclusion.

'Democracy,' he said, 'ought to be looked at from three angles: democracy as a sentiment toward the self, democracy as a sentiment toward the other, and democracy as the combination of the socio-political conditions necessary for the formation and development of such sentiments in the individual.' That is why he strongly believed that democracy be considered an educational enterprise for the whole community, administered through the implementation of a comprehensive curriculum that encompasses psychological, ethical, social and political aspects. Bennabi believed that an Islamic model of democracy is attainable. In his opinion this would be a superior model of democracy. Whereas in other models the main objective is to endow man with political rights, enjoyed by the ‘citizen’ in Western countries, or social securities, enjoyed by the ‘comrade’ in Eastern countries, Islam endows man with a value that surpasses every political or social value.
Bennabi’s analysis was revolutionary during his time, when Islamists in much of the Arab world, especially in the Middle East, made an enemy out of democracy without ever understanding it. Thanks to his disciples, such as Rachid Ghannouchi and other North African thinkers mainstream Islamic movements gradually relinquished old positions on this matter. Ghannouchi’s encounter with Bennabi happened when he traveled back home to Tunisia from France by land through Spain, Morocco and Algeria where he visited the man whose writings had already intrigued him. That explains the pioneering role of Ghannouchi and his Tunisian Islamic movement in espousing the cause of democracy and promoting it across the region. However, he has been rewarded with exile and his followers have been met with suppression and persecution.

Until Algeria’s democracy was derailed, sinking the country into bloodshed that has so far claimed more than 100,000 lives, Islamic movements throughout the Arabic speaking world were enthusiastically embracing the democratic cause. For some, this was the most appropriate thing to do since, pragmatically, they were going to reap the fruits of democratisation. For others, however, it was a question of conviction; democracy is the way forward if Muslims were to revive the Islamic value of shura which came to an end after Mu’awiyah and his son imposed oligarchy on the Muslim Ummah. Such a principled position had been expressed by prominent thinkers such as Ghannouchi who said: 'The Europeans benefited from the Islamic civilisation in creating profoundly enlightened conceptions of social values whose fruit was the emergence of liberal democracy;' or Tawfiq Ash-Shawi who wrote: 'Democracy is a European version of Islam’s shura. When the tree of shura withered in the land of Islam due to un-sustainability, its seeds were ploughed during the renaissance, in the lands of the Europeans where the tree of democracy grew and blossomed; or Hasan At-Turabi who wrote: 'The origin of modern democratic thinking is traceable back to the [Islamic] contract of bay`ah . The Europeans derived the origin of democratic theory from their contacts with the Islamic political fiqh (jurisprudence).

However, the nineties have witnessed the gradual erosion of enthusiasm for democracy within the circles of Islamic movement, though many of them continue to take part in the political process when permitted. Profound disappointment replaced the enthusiasm that prevailed toward the end of the eighties when the Middle East and North Africa awaited the breeze of democracy that blew across the globe. Unlike Eastern Europe and Central America, in the Arab and Muslim regions the breeze soon gave way to scorching winds of turmoil that only consolidated existing dictatorships across the region. It turns out that democracy, in as much as it entails free elections, accountability, transparency, the rule of law and protection of fundamental human rights, is a forbidden fruit in our part of the world.

Today, except for five Arab countries, where a degree of liberalisation has been allowed, no democratisation is tangible. In Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait and Yemen political parties do exist, parliaments do convene and elements of constitutionalism are found. The press in these countries is relatively free and, occasionally, political opposition is granted permission to assemble and protest. After several years of bloodshed and destruction, Algeria has chosen to join this club of Arab ‘semi-democracies’.

However, what impedes genuine democratisation even in those relatively ‘liberal’ states is that the top executive enjoys absolute powers, usually provided and protected by the armed forces and other paramilitary agencies -- such as the intelligence services -- so much so that the rule of law and the people’s right to choose, assemble and speak are easily undermined. In almost every one of these countries the judiciary is quite independent and vocal but suspected opponents of the regime -- and for that matter all those who allegedly pose a threat to the ‘state’ -- are arbitrarily arrested, detained without trial for as long as the state wishes and then brought before military courts for summary trial and punishment. Emergency laws dating from colonial times are enacted to intimidate and brutalise critics while silencing potential dissent.

Local despotism hinders democratisation. However, what is even more formidable obstacle is the attitude of the world’s leading liberal democracies that sponsor, support or protect most of the despots in the region. The Economist once noted that to the U.S. democracy meant two things: free-market economy; and posing no threat to American interests. Evidently, the United States of America has shown interest in promoting democracy elsewhere in the world