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| Dialogue with Orthodox Islam |
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Despite fifty years of scholarship Lewis failed to predict how Muslims would respond to an American occupation of Muslim land. In 2001 he said that public opinion in Iraq and Iran was so pro-American that both peoples would rejoice if the US army liberated them. A year later, he repeated the message that "if we succeed in overthrowing the regimes of what President Bush has rightly called the 'Axis of Evil' the scenes of rejoicing in their cities would even exceed those that followed the liberation of Kabul." Perhaps there was a sense of relief felt by many Iraqis when the Saddam Hussein government was removed but a sense of occupation has driven many ordinary Iraqis to take up arms against the US army.
Today, many if not most of the Muslim countries are dysfunctional. Politically the governments in many Muslim states are dictatorships based on monarchs, military rulers or life long Presidents. Most Muslims recognise and accept this fact. The 2002 Arab development programme report which was written by a group of Arab scholars from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) described the region as not developing as fast or as fully as other comparable regions. The most striking weakness identified in the report and one which the authors suggest lies behind all other problems is a lack of democracy, which leads to poor governance. The report points out that political participation in the Arab region is still limited compared to other regions and that the region is rated lower than any other for freedom of expression and accountability. The attitude of Arab governments towards civil societies ranged from opposition to manipulation to "freedom under surveillance".
This state of affairs cannot be put at the door of Islamic orthodoxy, since Islamic institutions and traditions have been marginalised for most of the last century in the Muslim world. Rather the last century has been one in which most Muslim countries have first been colonised and then inherited political, economic and social institutions that the colonialists left them. Even the concept of many independent countries in the Muslim world was new. During the early part of the twentieth century the French and the British governments agreed between themselves as to who would get which part of the dominions of the Ottoman state. The task of negotiations was delegated to Georges Picot of France and Sir Mark Sykes of Britain and the resulting Sykes-Picot agreement led to the division of the Ottoman state such that France's mandate corresponded to the future states of Syria and Lebanon and Britain's mandate corresponded to Iraq and Transjordan. France ended up with direct control of Mediterranean coastal regions whilst Britain ended up controlling the provinces of Basra and Baghdad and maintained an exclusive relationship with the Arab Gulf Sheikhdoms.
Where independence brought multi-party democracies, they were soon to disappear. Most Muslim countries were characterised by one coup after another as different political or military factions often supported by outside powers assumed power. There was the 1947 coup led by Colonel Husni Al-Za'im in Syria, the 1952 coup led by General Neguib in Egypt, the 1953 CIA sponsored coup that ended the rule of Prime Minister Mossadeq, the 1958 coup led by General Ayub Khan in Pakistan, the 1960 coup led by General Cemal Gürsel in Turkey, and so on.
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