Only If Compared to the Nazis

I've recently been rereading Bernard Lewis' What Went Wrong, a history of relations between Islam and the West. Lewis, now 94, is still highly regarded as one of the Western world's top authorities on the history of the Muslim Middle East and his book is an excellent account of how Arab Muslims, once the cultural leaders of the world, went into a long decline pretty much simultaneous with Europe's rise during the Enlightenment.

With Lewis' work on my mind I was thus drawn to a news story in the Daily Caller in which Lewis takes exception to much of the chatter in Washington about the benign intentions and peaceful aspirations of the Muslim Brotherhood. Lewis observes that the Muslim Brotherhood is benign only if one is comparing it to the Nazis:

Historian Bernard Lewis, 94, discussed the ongoing wave of anti-government protests across the Middle East in an interview published Friday in the Jerusalem Post.

Lewis expressed skepticism of the emergence of secular democracy in Egypt, and said that Western political systems may lead to disaster in Arab countries that have long been ruled by autocrats.

“I don’t know how one could get the impression that the Muslim Brotherhood is relatively benign unless you mean relatively as compared with the Nazi party,” Lewis said.

“In genuinely fair and free elections, [the Muslim parties] are very likely to win and I think that would be a disaster,” Lewis said of Egypt.

Throughout its history the Muslim world has been ruled by autocrats. It adopted the trappings of Western style democracy in the 19th century because it concluded that the ascendency of the West was due to its democratic forms of government, and the Islamic world felt that it had to follow that example if it was going to avoid complete extinction, but the Muslim heart has never really been in the effort.

The reason, perhaps, for this vacillation is that there is another strain of thought in the Muslim world, represented today by the Muslim Brotherhood, that holds that Muslim decline can only be reversed by getting rid of secularization and returning to rule by Islamic law. The thinking here is that God is punishing the Muslim world for having abandoned the true path, but as Lewis notes in his book, this is a bit of a hard sell when the beneficiaries of Muslim decline are the Western infidels.

At any rate, I'm no expert on the Arab world, but I would be very surprised if what emerges from the turmoil there are genuine democracies where the people are free in the sense that we in the West understand the word.

I will not be surprised if we find one autocrat replacing another, as happened in Iran in the late 70s, and the people just as tyrannized, if not moreso, as they were under the old regime.

Moreover, if this happens, I would be surprised if the new regimes were friendly to the West. In most revolutions the most ruthless and well-organized people eventually ascend to power. In Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere that would be Brotherhood-type hard-liners, more favorable to organizations like al Qaeda (which is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood), more hostile to Israel, and more inclined to use oil to compel compliance in the West.

I would not be surprised, as the fundamentalists consolidate their power, to see access to the Suez canal restricted, particularly for military vessels, nor would I be surprised to see a return to 70s era gas lines, coziness with China, a rapprochement with Iran, more terror attacks in Europe and the U.S., and more war against Israel.

Meanwhile, instead of seeking to make us less reliant on Middle East oil, and thus more detached from the conflicts raging there, the Obama administration seems to be doing everything it can to make our involvement more necessary by preventing American oil companies from drilling in American waters.

It's one of the mysteries of this very mysterious administration.