What Davatoglu meant was that the Middle East was in a state of obvious disequilibrium; the political systems that ruled over the ummah, especially the Arab world were not natural nor fit for the times. In a region with probably the most youthful population in the world, how is it possible for aging octogenarians to rule over the same people with static, unresponsive policies? Did anyone really think Mubarak -- or more accurately, what Mubarak represented -- would last? What was his stake to legitimacy?
More importantly, did anyone think this completely implanted political system imposed on arbitrary borders created after the first world war and based on notions of the liberal nation-state but which morphed into kleptocratic autocracies and defied over a millennium of Muslim political thought would be anything but a hiccup in the continuous history of the region?
Davutoglu, a historian at heart, declares in March of 2011, at the cusp of springtime, that "we are going through a natural flow of history. Why? Because there was a need for change...
There were two abnormalities in the last century in our region. The first abnormality was colonialism. And the second abnormality was the Cold War, which divided the societies, the countries, which divided our region. The first abnormality, colonialism, in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, divided the region into colonial entities and separated the natural links between tribes and communities... The countries [which] were divided because of the Cold War - South Yemen, North Yemen. Those countries who lived together for centuries became enemies to each other, like Turkey and Syria... Now it is time to naturalise the flow of history. I see all these processes as a delayed process... This is a paradigmatic shift. This is a natural flow of history. Everybody must respect this will of the people."
Thus, my biggest hope is that the flow of history is naturalized, as Davutoglu puts it. The region is not used to such foreign implants, and the changes which happen have to be organic and natural. From the bottom up, so to speak. The Muslim world and it's scholars, or ulema, to their credit, had tried to foster notions of unity and Muslim brotherhood from Islam's conception to the brink of the first world war. It didn't matter that you were Egyptian or Indian, as long as you were Muslim, you should be judged on your piety, not ethnicity. (although it didn't always work out that way). It didn't matter that Turks ruled over Arabs as long as the Turks were justly holding the banner of Islam and resisting against foreign powers, they were legitimate in the eyes of many Muslims. This mentality is not a bad one; it doesn't obsess over borders that much. As one of my professors said in Tehran, the borders before the age of nationalism were political borders, they were not social ones. My dream is that these social and cultural borders open up and that the Arab Spring can usher in dialogue between societies which had previously been rudely interrupted by the West.
"What is the future if this is the past? The past was the abnormality. The present change is a natural flow of the history and our future is our sense of common destiny. All of us, we have the common destiny."
Video streaming by Ustream
No comments:
Post a Comment