A talk by Brian Whitaker at the American University of Beirut, 9 June 2010, relating to the book, What's Really Wrong with the Middle East. 

THERE IS a discrepancy – quite a large discrepancy in fact – between the problems of the Middle East as perceived from the west and the problems as perceived by Arabs themselves. 

Western countries have one set of priorities, dominated mainly by concerns about their own security, while the Arab public have another. Arabs, on the whole, are less preoccupied with terrorism issues and also tend to be cynical of the constant discourse we hear in the west about democratisation.

During my research for the book, I interviewed a lot of quite ordinary Arabs – in fact I made a point of not speaking to politicians or government officials – and democracy was hardly mentioned as such, though there was a good deal of complaining about the lack of transparency and accountability, the lack of good governance and the need to get rid of corruption.

At the same time, I found a lot of frustration with the way Arab society works, especially in the education systems and the control that traditional family structures exert over their individual members.

So one thing I wanted to do in the book was highlight this mis-match between western and Arab perceptions of what is wrong with the Middle East.

I also wanted to challenge the idea that the Middle East's problems are mainly the fault of Arab regimes. We saw this during the Bush administration with all the talk about "regime change" and the idea that once Saddam Hussein was toppled from power in Iraq, everything would be fine – which of course it wasn't.

Authoritarian and repressive regimes are certainly a problem, but they are also products of the societies they govern. To understand the real nature of the problem we have to look not just at the regimes but at society as a whole. 

Rather than a talking about "freedom" in terms of free elections, as the Bush administration did, we have to look at freedom more broadly – what I refer to in the book as "freedom in depth".

I'm not planning to go into detail about the nature of the Middle East's problems today. You can read about them in the book and, living here in Lebanon, many of you will be familiar with them anyway. What I do want to look at today is the question: Where do we go from here?

The first thing to be said about this is that processes of change are already under way. They may be patchy and painfully slow, but they are happening. For one example, just look at Saudi Arabia where the current public debate about gender segregation would have been hard to imagine only a few years ago.

Change is being driven mainly by globalisation and cross-border communications: satellite television, foreign travel, the internet, and so on. That, in turn, fuels other processes of change within the Arab countries.

Last year there was an article on the CNN website with the headline: "Women, bloggers and gays lead change in the Arab world." It attracted some ridicule but I think the basic point was correct. Ordinary people who assert their rights present more of a challenge to the status quo than the so-called "reformist" politicians and opposition parties

I don't want to exaggerate the extent of this, but it's happening whether we like it or not and regardless of any attempts to control it. Interventions by governments can speed it up or slow it down but they can't stop it happening entirely.

This raises the question: should outsiders – and particularly western governments – try to help the process along, and if so, how?

There are many in the west who assume in a knee-jerk kind of way that "we" must "do something" about the Middle East. But that can easily do more harm than good.

Efforts to help from outside are often viewed with suspicion – which is not surprising, given the history of western powers' involvement in the region. Western-funded NGOs are often regarded as fifth-columnists and economic aid often ends up consolidating the status quo rather than hastening change (Egypt is a good example of that),

Another difficulty is that reliance on foreign assistance tends to perpetuate a culture of dependence and helplessness among Arabs themselves. This sense of helplessness is a major hurdle that needs to be overcome: Arabs have to work out their own solutions.

Having said that, though, the problems of the Arab countries are not exclusively Arabs' problems. In an increasingly inter-dependent world, as the importance of national sovereignty declines, everyone– to a greater or lesser degree – becomes a stakeholder in the solution: people as well as governments. But there's a crucial difference between being a stakeholder and dictating the shape of the outcome: western countries can be facilitators for freedom, but they shouldn't try to be its deliverers as well. 

So a good starting point is to recognise that the ability of westerners (and especially western governments) to bring positive change in the Middle East is limited and that ill-considered interventions can make matters worse.

If we are looking for one single thing that western powers could do to hasten positive change in the Middle East, it would be working harder to resolve the conflict with Israel. 

For more than sixty years this issue has blighted the region and overshadowed the political discourse. It has also spawned militant and terrorist groups of almost every kind, from nationalist to Islamist, and has helped to keep authoritarian regimes in power by diverting the attention of Arabs from their own internal problems.

There's no doubt that removing the Arab-Israeli conflict from the equation would create a climate that's much more conducive to change, but we can't assume it will happen. At the same time, though, it's defeatist to suggest that the wider problems of the Arab world can't be tackled until it does happen.

ONE of the main planks of the Bush administration's policy in the Middle East was what Bush called his "forward strategy of freedom"– which in essence meant promoting democracy in the form of free elections.

That might be a fine idea in principle, but there were some obvious difficulties.

The first was the problem of conflicting American interests, which mean that the policy wasn't (or perhaps couldn't be) applied equitably. 

While claiming to promote freedom and democracy the United States continued to support client regimes that often showed little respect for either. Regimes considered hostile to the United States were thus condemned as irredeemably undemocratic while the friendly ones received praise for their often minimal "reforms". 

The contortions this required could be seen from Bush's speech in 2003, setting out his "forward strategy of freedom". The countries where he claimed to detect "stirrings" of democracy – Morocco, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Yemen, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Egypt– were all friendly towards the United States. Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy with an appalling human rights record (but a valuable US ally) won praise for "taking first steps toward reform". 

The selective nature of this campaign for democracy was so transparent that it swept away any hopes of credibility the plan might have had, deepening wariness within the region about America's real intentions. 

As Kenneth Roth, the director of Human Rights Watch, put it: "This obvious double standard makes the promotion of democracy seem like an act of political convenience rather than a commitment of principle, weakening the pressure for real democratic change."

Assertions of the freedom principle were further contaminated during the Bush administration by the "war on terror" which provided a smokescreen for repressive measures in the name of combating extremism. Meanwhile, the scandal of Abu Ghraib, the American-run prison in Iraq, plus the treatment of detainees in Guantanamo deflected attention from similar abuses by Arab regimes. 

Another source of conflict between democracy promotion and other aspects of US foreign policy is that free elections do not necessarily bring the happy outcome that the US would like to envisage. Indeed, there is a high probability that they will not: given a free choice for the first time in years, it is scarcely surprising if voters express pent-up resentments against the old regime by voting for radical change. 

A grim early warning of how this could develop came from the Algerian elections of December 1991 when the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) won 188 parliamentary seats outright in the first round, and seemed certain to gain an overall majority in the second round. The elections were duly aborted and Algeria then plunged into a long armed conflict which is estimated to have claimed more than 100,000 lives. Saudi Arabia's first tentative foray into electoral politics – with men-only local elections in 2005 – also brought significant victories for Islamist candidates rather than the liberalisers who had been pressing for democracy.

The elections to the Palestinian parliament held in 2006 – the first for ten years – were meant to bolster the position of President Mahmoud Abbas but instead delivered an overall majority to Hamas. The electoral process that led to this result met international standards but for Israel, the US, the EU and numerous other countries, the outcome was simply unacceptable. A few weeks later, the New York Times reported:

The United States and Israel are discussing ways to destabilise the Palestinian government so that newly elected Hamas officials will fail and elections will be called again ... 

More generally, fears that democracy can lead to an Islamist takeover play into the hands of autocratic rulers. "Savvy dictators have learned to use a me-or-them logic to justify continued rule," Roth notes. 

Of course, people who vote for Islamist parties are not necessarily Islamists themselves. In many cases– and I think this was true of Palestine – what we're seeing is protest votes against the establishment. 

Islamist parties are often the most credible alternative because of the way that secular parties have been constrained. The need here, Roth suggests, is to ensure that voters "face a meaningful range of political options before marking their ballot". 

Nevertheless, if western powers genuinely want to see democracy established in the region they have no choice but to accept the existence of Islamist parties as part of the region's political mix.

IF WE'RE REALISTIC about it, though, it's difficult to envisage a situation where the US would not have some kind of conflict between democracy promotion and its other political interests in the region. So we ought to ask whether there might be better ways of promoting freedom that don't focus so heavily on elections.

This is where we come to what I call "freedom in depth". The Bush administration's approach was basically superficial. It was looking for quick results– mainly in the form of regime change and free elections – but with little regard for creating the social and political institutions needed to give them solid foundations. 

The Bush approach was also mis-directed, pinning most of the blame on autocratic regimes when, in reality, such regimes are as much a symptom of the problem as its cause. 

Of course, Arab regimes do systematically deny people their rights, imprison people unjustly and torture them, but most of the abuses of rights in the Middle East – at least in terms of the numbers affected and their impact on everyday life – are inflicted by ordinary people upon each other. Discrimination, whether it is based on ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality or family background, is rife almost everywhere.

These are the kind of issues that would be addressed by a freedom-in-depth approach: personal liberties, respect for human rights, equality of opportunity and so on.

Focusing on rights rather than regimes can underpin political and social change as well as helping to drive it forward. If done in an even-handed way, it is also less likely to be perceived as furthering a foreign political agenda. 

The key point about human rights is that they apply to everyone, everywhere, without distinction. As fellow members of the human race, we all have a stake in protecting these rights– and that includes doing what we can to support people who are deprived of them, regardless of national boundaries and irrespective of religion or culture.

This is something the US and other western countries can legitimately be involved in but it's not a matter for governments alone. Non-governmental organisations and individuals have a role too: grassroots support and solidarity is an important component in creating a transnational impetus for change.

Knowing that people outside the country are taking an interest can be very important for activists inside the country, especially if they are facing repression. Considering that some issues are still too sensitive to be talked about inside the country, raising them outside also helps to break down the internal taboos about discussing them.

At the same time, though, western countries have to be seen upholding the values they preach. Among other things, that means no more Guantánamos, more Abu Ghraibs – and Barack Obama's decision, as one of the first acts of his presidency, to close Guantánamo was certainly a step in the right direction. 

Perhaps even more significantly for the long term, Obama's election, as an African-American, was a powerful message in itself to people in all those countries where such things seem impossible. Could a Kurd ever become president of Syria, or a Christian president of Egypt? Obama's description of the United States, in his victory speech, as "a place where all things are possible" invited the question: why not the Middle East too?

Freedom in depth rather than the Bush style of democracy promotion may be a more promising way to proceed but we still have to deal with the problem of double standards – the tendency of governments to take a soft line with friendly regimes and a hard line with hostile ones.

One way around this is to look at progress towards democracy, human rights, etc, comparatively – by considering where each country stands in relation to others. 

This already happens to some extent with the "freedom" ratings produced by Freedom House and Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index. 

A similar example at a government level is the US State Department's classification system for human trafficking which divides countries into three categories. In the top tier are those that fully comply with minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking. 

In the second tier are those that do not fully comply but "are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance" and the bottom tier is for those that "neither satisfy the minimum standards nor demonstrate a significant effort to come into compliance". 

The second tier also includes a watch list of countries "requiring special scrutiny". Countries in the bottom tier may be subjected to certain kinds of sanctions.

If the methodology for compiling these league tables is reasonably transparent and the same benchmarks are used for all countries, they can help to reduce the influence of broader foreign policy considerations. 

Interestingly, the fourteen countries in the State Department's bottom tier for human trafficking in 2008 (half of them Arab countries) included a number of long-standing allies as well as foes: Algeria, Burma, Cuba, Fiji, Iran, Kuwait, Moldova, North Korea, Oman, Papua New Guinea, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Syria. 

One benefit of league tables is that they make discrimination by western powers more difficult, since it is easier to see if one country is being let off the hook while another is being victimised for extraneous reasons. 

There is also some evidence that a poor ranking can induce some countries to improve their performance, especially those that are sensitive about their international image. Qatar, for example, started work on a new law against human trafficking while Saudi Arabia launched an anti-corruption campaign after Transparency International's index showed the kingdom was perceived as far more corrupt than its Gulf neighbours.

ONE WAY or another, the problems that I highlighted in my book – patriarchy, autocracy, intolerance, discrimination, corruption and the suppression of free speech – involve a denial of rights, and denial of equal rights in particular. 

As a first step towards positive change Arabs must recognise that rights are an entitlement, not a privilege to be granted or removed on the whim of a ruler. The second step is to embrace the principle of equal rights. 

Though much abused in practice, equality is nevertheless widely recognised as desirable and is espoused, in a rather abstract way, by most Arab constitutions. The problem, therefore, is not so much the concept as how to internalise and apply it – which at least provides a starting point for activists to build on. 

Unlike calls for democracy, demands for equal rights are less tainted by associations with the west and are difficult to oppose by rational argument, though some object on religious and traditionalist grounds. Focusing on equal rights thus forces rejectionists on to weak ground, defending the indefensible.

Achieving equal rights is likely to be a piecemeal process that moves forward by addressing specific abuses rather than the generalities. Winning acceptance of the equality principle in one area, even a small one, has a knock-on effect which, over time, becomes cumulative and begins to change attitudes and practices more generally. 

Tackling the issue of human trafficking, for example, raises questions about how to prevent it – thus also focusing attention on the need for effective laws – as well as questions about other unfair employment practices.

SO FAR, I haven't mentioned one very important element in all this, which is religion.

Equal rights cannot exist without freedom of religion. In the Arab countries this is probably the biggest single obstacle to positive change, because religious teaching is so often invoked to justify abuses that can't be justified by rational argument. 

Separation of religion and state is therefore essential to any serious agenda for reform but also, in the short term, very difficult to achieve.

The influence of religion in Arab countries is undoubtedly strengthened by political repression and poor standards of education. In a less repressive atmosphere, and with a better quality of education, it is likely that people would turn to more enlightened forms of Islam where reason triumphs. 

In most Arab countries, though, at present and for the foreseeable future, the influence of religion (and especially dogmatic forms of it) is inescapable – which raises the question of how to respond.

In many societies discussion of social and political change relies mainly on secular arguments. Human rights activists and feminists in most parts of the world have usually shown little interest in religious debate, judging – correctly in most cases – that abuses are social or cultural in origin, even when religion is invoked to justify them. Some are also reluctant to engage in religious argument for fear of bolstering the status of religion at the expense of secular movements and institutions. 

This broadly applies to the Arab countries too, where the first generation of human rights activists in the 1980s came mainly from a nationalist or leftist background and approached the problem from a secular viewpoint. Similarly, it is noticeable that the Arab Human Development Reports – produced by reform-minded Arabs under UN auspices – present a wide-ranging critique of the region's problems with little more than a passing nod towards the influence of religion.

But in societies where religion is so pervasive at a daily level, secular arguments don't carry much weight. If people are to be persuaded, the religious dimension must be taken into account, as Kecia Ali notes in her book on sexual ethics and Islam. She writes:

For the vast majority of Muslims worldwide – not only extremists or conservatives, but also those who consider themselves moderate or progressive – determining whether a particular belief or practice is acceptable largely hinges on deciding whether or not it is legitimately "Islamic". 

Even many of those who do not base their personal conduct or ideals on normative Islam believe, as a matter of strategy, that in order for social changes to achieve wide acceptance among Muslims they must be convincingly presented as compatible with Islam. 

Following the September 11 attacks, the need to engage with religion became more widely recognised, but in ways that were often misguided. Various western leaders tried, as Amartya Sen puts it, to "present a superficially nobler vision" that would woo terrorists away from violence by defining Islam as a religion of peace and tolerance. Sen continues:

The denial of the necessity of a confrontational reading of Islam is certainly appropriate and extremely important today, and Tony Blair in particular deserves much applause for what he has done in this respect. 

But in the context of Blair's frequent invoking of "the moderate and true voice of Islam", we have to ask whether it is at all possible – or necessary – to define a "true Muslim" in terms of political and social beliefs about confrontation and tolerance, on which different Muslims have historically taken ... very different positions. 

So, just as it is futile to counter religious arguments with secular ones and hope that people will be persuaded, it is also problematic to invoke the "true voice" of Islam. 

Islamists and religious traditionalists do this all the time. When scholars begin a sentence with the words "Islam says ...", it is a sure sign that some particularly dogmatic statement is about to follow. The point of doing this is to claim a monopoly on rectitude: by asserting that the speaker's view is the correct one and that anyone who disputes it cannot be a good Muslim. Such claims seek to shut down debate rather than open it up. 

The fact of the matter is that various interpretations of scripture are possible, and no one can say for certain which of them is "correct". Once people recognise that no one has a monopoly on truth, the fatwas issued by extrremists start to lose their power and people begin to make their own moral choices.

This is a very important point, but a lot of reform-minded Muslims still don't get it. They try to play the clerics at their own game, by engaging in fatwa wars.

One recent example was a 600-page fatwa against terrorim issued by Muhammad ul-Qadri, the founder and leader of a small Muslim sect based in Pakistan, which caused a good deal of excitement among the media in Britain. 

But the kinds of people praising it were the sort who would never contemplate engaging in terrorism anyway, and there was no reason to think it would have any influence on Islamist militants.

Seeking to counter "bad" fatwas with "good" fatwas – well-intentioned as it may be – is not only futile but anti-progressive and further entrenches the authoritarian tendencies in Islam. Issuing fatwas and promoting them, even in a good cause, is damaging because it ends up reinforcing the importance attached to fatwas in general.

This is not to say that bad fatwas should go unchallenged. There's certainly a need to open up debate but it should not be done of the basis of competing authorities claiming to have the only correct answers. Nor should it be exclusively the preserve of accredited religious scholars; the need is to encourage ordinary Muslims to think for themselves.

Human rights activists working in the Arab countries have to engage with the religious arguments, not so much to refute them as to challenge them and ultimately to neutralise them by demonstrating the scope for a variety of interpretations. In that way a space is created where people can confront the underlying moral issues and feel free enough to make their own choices.

One Arab human rights organisation that has begun engaging with religion in this way is the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, though this policy is still controversial among other acitvists in Egypt.

Its director, Hossam Bahgat, explained:

We ... decided to actively engage with the shari'a arguments that are sometimes brought as justification for certain human rights abuses, in particular with regard to issues of religious freedom, religious discrimination, issues of sexuality and the death penalty– issues where the heart of the opposing argument, or the justification for the abuse, is Islamic law. 

We realised that we can no longer afford to look the other way and ignore the Islamic law argument by just stressing the universality of human rights and the principles of equality, justice and freedom.

We needed to do our homework and study shari'a and to argue back when the government or other conservative forces in society quote shari'a arguments against us, and we realised that in some instances we can win.

One area where they used this approach was in a campaign for official recognition of the Baha'i faith in Egypt. 

Bahgat told me: "One scholar after another, one government official after another, would insist that under Islam only three religions are allowed– Islam, Christianity and Judaism, but when we started doing research we realised there is no basis in the Qur'an or the Sunna to support their claim that Muslims may only coexist with 'people of the book'– and we started saying so." 

He continued:

I was once in a televised debate with the former president of al-Azhar university who was one of the chief jurists of the Islamic Religious Council and we were talking about the Baha'i faith. He started stating the usual position that Islam only allows adherents to the three Abrahamic religions. So I challenged him on this and said: "What's your evidence?"

I think he was stunned. He never expected a human rights activist to start questioning his shari'a argument. He hadn't even bothered to prepare a shari'a argument. I was prepared, so cited all the arguments from shari'a – all the evidence about how the Prophet Muhammad in Madina never discriminated between people of the Book and others who adhered to other faiths– like the Zoroastrians, for example. 

I cited them one after the other and he couldn't argue with my evidence because my evidence came not from fringe opinions but from major books that are selectively avoided by scholars because they don't give them the cover they want for their bigotry.

So the point here is that when the scholar was challenged on religious grounds, he immediately shifted to secular arguments, saying that the Baha'is have their headquarters in Haifa in Israel, they are a threat to society and national unity, and so on. Once this shift occurs, the debate moves into territory where it can be more easily dealt with.

ONE FURTHER point by way of conclusion. There's a widespread believe that Arab societies are somehow unique and also peculiarly resistant to change.

What struck me as a foreigner researching this book was actually how similar they are to others. Most of the debates you hear today about Arab society have been heard before in other countries– and it's often striking how familiar the arguments sound.

The debate about criminalisation of witchcraft which we hear today in Saudi Arabia was resolved in Britain in the 18th century, but in both cases the argument is basically the same. It's about treating witches and magicians as fraudsters rather than agents of Satan.

Arabs who want change would be less pessimistic, I think, if they knew more about these parallels – if they knew that European countries once had patriarchal societies much like theirs, that the free expression we have in Britain today was the result of centuries of struggle, that it was once illegal to report what was said in parliament, that people could be executed in Britain for homosexuality until as recently as 1869 (and imprisoned for it right up to 1967), and that women in Britain did not fully achieve the right to vote until 1928.

Many societies around the world have managed to evolve and adapt, and I can see no reason why Arab societies shouldn't be able to do the same. The question, really, is not whether they will change, but how long it will take.