Orwell never did get the revolution he was hoping for when he wrote in Nineteen Eighty Four, “if there is hope, it lies in the Proles”. But if there’s any consolation, these prophetic words came true this year after the Arab Spring that gripped the Middle East.
Just as Communism failed the world over, so did the Muslim world’s very peculiar interpretation of a revolution. Other than a lot of rubbish strewn streets and pictures of hideous booty from tyrant’s palaces, it’s hard to see what has been achieved at all. The post revolution elections were also a painful anti-climax. In Tunisia, once a bastion of secularism in the Arab World, Islamist leaning Ennahada won 89 of the 217 contested seats. Rather than attempt to tackle Tunisia’s over reliance on foreign investment, Ennahada’s first political action was to shut down Tunis’ fledgling red light district. Further to the west in Morocco, the right wing Justice and Development party won nearly a third of the total seats, promising a return to “traditional values”.
Why would the Muslim world, despite massive educational and economic development in the last fifty years, choose to look not just to the East rather than the West as a way of forging a new social identity, but on a more universal level, to the past rather than the future? The availability of mass media effectively rendered defunct the sophisticated mind games of the old regimes, as well as casting doubt on the question of social isolation. Asef Bayat’s 2002 pre-revolution book, ‘Making Islam Democratic’ mentions the old favourite, western imperialism. However, what the decision to shut down Tunis’ red light district, the oldest trade in the world, has to do with western imperialism is anyone’s guess.
Perhaps, although no one likes to admit it, resurgent Islam’s popularity has nothing to do with an anti-imperialist backlash, or the supposed appeal of religion over the corrupt politics of the West. The reason why the Arab Spring started to look like 1979 Iran all over again has more to do with the most primal instinct of all. Making babies.
Let us be under no illusion, educated people do not have enough children whilst their uneducated countrymen have too many. It takes no genius to work out that an illiterate labourer’s family of eight fills the ballot box faster than a teacher’s family of four. The core support for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood lies not in the wealthy central Cairo neighbourhood of Zamalek, but in the sprawling, biblical looking mud huts the tour buses pass on their way to the Pyramids.
Islamist parties, after decades of persecution from the ruling, largely secular elite, have had time to do their homework. The Middle East’s rapid development in the latter part of the 20th century was a tale of two halves. Although the Gulf’s swanky shopping centres or Egypt’s tourist industry can rival those of any western country, the structure of Middle Eastern society remains positively medieval, split between a small, ruling elite and a heaving proletariat, without a sizeable middle class to act as a cushion in-between.
Whilst plotting their reprise behind locked doors, the Islamists became bored of revising political tactics and instead turned to something that needed no thought at all: large families. In countries such as Egypt where birth rates and illiteracy rates remain stubbornly high, the slums of any large Arab city remain ideal receptors for Islamist sympathy. As Asef Bayat justly affirms, the poor, preoccupied with daily subsistence, “cannot afford to be ideological”. Western notions of tolerance and equality mean little to the poor, left out by rapid development, whose knowledge of the arts extends little beyond a rudimentary grasp of the Qur’an. Therefore, the Islamists in the post revolution elections have embraced the democratic principles of citizen participation and individual rights. Notions that are concerned more with the physicality of turning up to vote rather than difficult, abstract notions of equality and tolerance.
If the answer is so simple, why then has the question of numbers eluded so many western political strategists? As well as containing considerably fewer syllables than weighty terms like “stagnation in socio-religious thought” or “global marketisation”, the question of demographics very easily assumes a sinister edge. No one likes to confront the question of who should or should not have the right to vote. Quantifying people like a classroom biology experiment forces people to confront disturbing lessons from history.
However, unless the West faces up to this population time bomb, the chances of anything close to a western democracy being installed in the Arab world will remain as remote as the chances of a Saudi Gay Pride parade. Without effective family planning, compulsory education and a secular government, a feudal, Eloi/Morlock style society will never be broken.
