Oct 5, 2024 08:33 PM
(This post was last modified: Oct 5, 2024 09:03 PM by C C.)
An idealist who "betrays" when it finally comes crunch-time was probably a covert realist all along.
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Saad Eddin Ibrahim spent his life advocating for democratization in the Arab world, but ended it as an apologist for authoritarianism
https://newlinesmag.com/essays/the-contr...ciologist/
EXCERPTS: Saad Eddin Ibrahim spent his career insisting that democracy is the solution both to political authoritarianism and to the allures of religious fundamentalism in the Arab world. Pushing back against the prevailing view that Islamist groups must be marginalized, he argued that they should be included in the democratic process...
[...] Despite his position being ignored for decades in the name of regional stability, Ibrahim’s ideas about Islam and democracy couldn’t help but be meaningfully considered in the revolutionary moments in Tahrir Square in 2011.
But a mere two years later, his historical legacy was torn asunder. After a lifetime of championing democratic ideals, he abruptly degenerated into an apologist for authoritarian counterrevolution.
[...] Seeing my mentor’s change of heart led me to dig deeper. With whatever spare time I could muster alongside my doctoral work on an adjacent topic, I read voraciously into the history of Egyptian liberalism, the strand of thinking Ibrahim identified as pivotal to his own...
[...] This two-year exploration revealed that the project of Arab liberalism, to which Ibrahim both subscribed and contributed through his considerable writings, was ultimately beholden to an authoritarian contradiction. While he spent years advocating for reconciliation with the Muslim Brotherhood, when that organization actually gained power in 2012 (and handled it terribly), it proved too burdensome for Ibrahim’s thought experiment. Indeed, the project of Arab liberalism was freighted from its inception with a visceral fear of Islam in public life.
This was in large part because many of Arab liberalism’s leading lights were so mesmerized by European liberal philosophy that they hoped to simply transplant its models to their homeland...
[...] we must remain equally judicious in recognizing the contradictions of Ibrahim’s thought, particularly as the same blind spots endure beyond Egypt. Throughout Muslim-majority countries, we see examples of liberal and leftist figures who are so terrified of a public role for Islam that they are willing to ally with the most horrific forms of authoritarianism to extirpate it. We saw this phenomenon in Syria, where figures of this type bought into President Bashar al-Assad’s propaganda, seeing the “secular” tyrant as preferable to any Islamic alternative... (MORE - details)
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Saad Eddin Ibrahim spent his life advocating for democratization in the Arab world, but ended it as an apologist for authoritarianism
https://newlinesmag.com/essays/the-contr...ciologist/
EXCERPTS: Saad Eddin Ibrahim spent his career insisting that democracy is the solution both to political authoritarianism and to the allures of religious fundamentalism in the Arab world. Pushing back against the prevailing view that Islamist groups must be marginalized, he argued that they should be included in the democratic process...
[...] Despite his position being ignored for decades in the name of regional stability, Ibrahim’s ideas about Islam and democracy couldn’t help but be meaningfully considered in the revolutionary moments in Tahrir Square in 2011.
But a mere two years later, his historical legacy was torn asunder. After a lifetime of championing democratic ideals, he abruptly degenerated into an apologist for authoritarian counterrevolution.
[...] Seeing my mentor’s change of heart led me to dig deeper. With whatever spare time I could muster alongside my doctoral work on an adjacent topic, I read voraciously into the history of Egyptian liberalism, the strand of thinking Ibrahim identified as pivotal to his own...
[...] This two-year exploration revealed that the project of Arab liberalism, to which Ibrahim both subscribed and contributed through his considerable writings, was ultimately beholden to an authoritarian contradiction. While he spent years advocating for reconciliation with the Muslim Brotherhood, when that organization actually gained power in 2012 (and handled it terribly), it proved too burdensome for Ibrahim’s thought experiment. Indeed, the project of Arab liberalism was freighted from its inception with a visceral fear of Islam in public life.
This was in large part because many of Arab liberalism’s leading lights were so mesmerized by European liberal philosophy that they hoped to simply transplant its models to their homeland...
[...] we must remain equally judicious in recognizing the contradictions of Ibrahim’s thought, particularly as the same blind spots endure beyond Egypt. Throughout Muslim-majority countries, we see examples of liberal and leftist figures who are so terrified of a public role for Islam that they are willing to ally with the most horrific forms of authoritarianism to extirpate it. We saw this phenomenon in Syria, where figures of this type bought into President Bashar al-Assad’s propaganda, seeing the “secular” tyrant as preferable to any Islamic alternative... (MORE - details)