Fantasy politics in the Arab world

The power of self-delusion in the Arab world is a fascinating phenomenon. Take politics: instead of being honest about our disagreements we like to pretend that they somehow resemble western political conflicts. We get carried away and start using words like ‘leftist’, ‘liberal’, and ‘neo-liberal’ to give some depth to our confused fumbling, like a teenager trying to unhook a bra while desperately trying to come up with excuses. Those political categories are metaphors at best in this part of the world; our politics is driven mainly by narrow pragmatic considerations that have nothing to do with those imported political categories.

So imagine my surprise today when I saw the headline ‘Enlightenment First’ in an editorial by Khaled Saghieh in Al-Akhbar. But what I mistook for an epiphany turned out to be yet another example of political cross-dressing. The gist of the column is that liberals in the Arab world are working in the service of dictatorships under the pretext of promoting reform and modernisation. Using recent examples from Egypt and Tunisia, Saghieh argues that ‘liberals’ are publicly supporting bids by corrupt rulers to stay in power. The threat of political Islam has apparently caused those liberals to ally themselves with dictators, an alliance that they justify through the need for development.