ALAS, our fortnight in Morocco is drawing to an end. As I sit at my laptop in our rented cottage in Oualadia, I can see the deep blue sea meet the pale sky in the distance. Nearer to the shore, the estuary forming the lagoon, famous locally for its cultivated oyster beds, flows deep and fast.
We were on the edge of the Sahara last week, staying at a small, mud-brick hotel. Chatting with our Moroccan friend and travelling companion one evening, I asked him about the development of democracy after Mohammad VI, the young king, inherited the throne from his iron-fisted father, Hasan II. Speaking about the high hopes all Moroccans had at the time, he described the widespread disappointment when the successor continued his father’s authoritarian policies.
More surprising than this oft-expressed sentiment was his wife’s reaction: she nudged him quietly to stop him from continuing with his indiscreet comments. Even in such a remote place, the fear of being reported for anti-government views is ever present. The media is completely muzzled, with a new law in place to further control the press. The French dailies I am able to follow are full of effusive praise for the king, and none carry any of the whispers of corruption in high places I come across all the time. With parliamentary elections due next year, nobody thinks anything will change as they are expected to be rigged, just as the ones in 2002 apparently were.
On our trip to the desert, we spent a night at Ouarzazate (now here’s a name to roll around the tongue!), a major staging post for the caravans heading into the Sahara. It now boasts three major film studios where many famous foreign movies have been made. Ouarzazate now has another claim to fame: according to a recent documentary about the CIA’s policy of ‘extraordinary rendition’, several suspected Islamic terrorists have been illegally arrested in the West and jailed in a nearby prison.
Although the country continues to attract millions of tourists to its lovely shores, stunning mountains and historic cities, a high birth rate ensures that unemployment remains an economic and political problem. Since secular, constitutional opposition has been largely blocked, dissidence has gone underground, and here, the Islamic groups have made some headway. Ancient tensions between the Berbers (the original inhabitants of the country), and the dominant Arabs thickens the brew of discontent.
But despite the lack of political freedoms, the society as a whole is far more integrated than Pakistan’s. For instance, Khalid, our driver for a week, often joined us for lunch. He had none of the obsequiousness that sets Asian domestic staff apart. Ismail, our guide at an old Berber palace, spoke eloquently and fearlessly about the history and politics of the Glaoui opposition to the late Hasan II. Ordinary people are friendly and relaxed with foreigners, displaying none of the aggression and rudeness visitors to Pakistan often have to put up with.
I asked Ismail if, after 9/11, the pressure for democracy in the Arab world had increased. He was clear that people wanted political freedom, but would have nothing to do with the “American democracy Bush wants to impose on us.” I argued that democracy was not an American monopoly or franchise being exported by Washington, but something we needed in order to take power away from a selfish ruling class. But Ismail was adamant: he wanted no truck with ‘American democracy’.
And herein lies a huge problem: in the aftermath of 9/11 and the stated American policy of pushing for change in the Middle East, democracy has come to be viewed as a demand of the hated Bush administration. And this is as deadly a kiss of death as any in the current political climate. Anything the Americans say is good for Muslims is now viewed as a poisoned chalice.
If ‘democracy’ is to be tarred with the same brush as ‘liberalism’ and ‘secularism’, then the future is bleak indeed. Across the Muslim world, the two latter labels have acquired a certain noxious reputation that makes middle-of-the-road politicians shy away from owning them. Hard-line mullahs have successfully equated them with the depraved West. For instance, ‘secularism’ has falsely been translated as ‘ladinyat’, or ‘lack of religion’ in Urdu when it actually means the separation of state and religion.
Such semantic differences are not mere exercises in linguistics. It is here that the battle lines between the fundamentalists and the rationalists are drawn. And while this war between obscurantism and modernity has raged for centuries, it has now reached a climax, and the outcome will decide the relevance of the Muslims to the rest of the world for a long time to come.
In this contest between competing ideas and ideologies, 9/11 was a seminal point, crystallizing a moment in history when we were all forced to state clearly where we stood. Are we for an orderly world governed by laws and agreements, or are we for violent change aimed at ushering in a utopia based on a mythical past? Are we for stability based on democracy and free choice, or are we for anarchy and chaos?
Perhaps I have oversimplified, but the choices for the Muslim world are clear. Today, millions of Muslims are straddling the fence, saying in effect that while they are not for violence, Al Qaeda and its ilk do have a point. They then recite a litany of real and imagined wrongs inflicted on the Islamic world by the West, and blame the ongoing events in Palestine, Kashmir and Chechnya for the depredations of Osama Bin Laden and his holy warriors. But the fence is not a comfortable place to sit on for very long.
Facing them is an increasingly implacable West which sees bigoted Islamic beliefs as a growing threat to international stability and economic well-being. To break the grip of what they see as mediaeval ideas, western ideologues seek to promote democracy and globalisation. Both sides are talking at each other, not to each other. Muslims point to the meltdown and incipient civil war raging in Iraq as an instance of the disastrous outcome of western meddling. They also cite the electoral victory of Hamas and its rejection by the West as an example of hypocrisy.
They are both right and wrong: democracy cannot be imposed by outsiders. But that does not mean we do not need it for ourselves. Somehow, we must learn that reason and rationality need to be accepted and internalised before we can take our rightful place in the world.
Meanwhile, back in Oualidiah, the weather is glorious, and I am off to lunch on the famous oysters.