Letter 2 America for July 5, 2013

Dear America,

After a bloodless coup in Egypt, the country is now in flux once again making Egypt's potential for hostility toward the United States and the west in general an open question.  The fundamentalist oriented former president, Mohamed Morsi, is under house arrest, and the mood of the country seems jubilant, but there is a substantial constituency that supports Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood Party...enough to elect him president, albeit in a fractionalized field of candidates.  Thus, the possibility of sectarian conflict both politically and literally seems a real consideration, though the Egyptian military is the most trusted institution in the Egyptian government and it has made it clear that it will quell any revolution, or as in this case, nip it in the bud.  It is the most powerful political force...essentially unassailably so...in Egypt, and perhaps in North Africa as a whole, so the prospect of instability is so remote as to be insignificant at this time.  But as the Obama administration has made clear, an open-ended term of military government is an undesirable outcome for Egypt, the region and the world, not to mention the Egyptian people, and unlike many other countries in Africa, the military itself seems to accept that notion.  That leaves the problem of finding a permanent solution to the schism in Egyptian society between the more fundamentalist constituency represented primarily by the Muslim Brotherhood and the modernist, secular society that apparently is the desire of the tens of thousands who have taken to the streets twice in three years to inspire the populist military to change governments on their behalf.  The reality is that there can be no internal peace in Egypt unless that secular contingent is recognized and heeded, but the more religious contingent cannot be ignored either, as other nations in the region have come to recognize since the Arab Spring most recently, and in the case of Iran, since the early seventies.  It appears to me that the modern world must soon recon with the fact that, just as in the Christian milieu, there is a fundamentalist movement that will not fade away, and must therefore be accommodated in some way in order to avoid the aberrations of Jihadism in the case of Islam and reactionaries in power as in the case of some of the state legislatures in our country, not to mention the Blue Dog Democrats and the Tea Party types who have brought our political process to a stand-still.

Actually, the problem in the United States is less dire in terms of consequence, but perhaps more intractable because of it.  With a democratic social framework on which to hang, those who would prevent movement toward a progressive society may not have the power to implement their own vision, but they do have the power to prevent the implementation of the visions of others.  The inertia we are suffering on account of the Ted Cruz's and Trey Gowdy's of the congress is frustrating and inimical to social progress, but no one is dieing on account of it...at least not at the hands of murderous individuals with a political purpose.  That some of our people will die for want of medical care that could save them is repugnant, but it isn't the same thing, intransigent as the adversaries of things like universal health care are.  In a full-fledged democracy like ours, these things must run their political course, and progress is made only in fits and starts as the political pendulum swings.  Thus, in a sense Egypt has an advantage over fully democratic societies like ours.  The military can intervene, and the vast majority of the population trusts it to do the right thing.  In some respects, the first post-Mubarek constitution and government was an experiment run by the military, which both spawned Mubarek and cut him off at the knees when it became obvious that he had gone too far toward oligarchy for the majority of Egyptians to tolerate it any longer.  What the military allowed to ensue was the advent of a more Islamic state structure with a government populated by a plurality that could only be characterized as religiously conservative and willing to bind society at large to such principles as their ethos dictated.  But like the previous secular, meretricious oligarchy, it failed to garner the support of the majority of Egyptians, and for that matter, accomplished very little in the way of progress even toward a semi-theocratic state.  Economic chaos still prevails in Egypt.  Tourism, which fueled the Egyptian economy to a large extent is moribund if not dead, and the nation-state itself seems adrift, so what is the military to do.

I believe that the political powers in the Near East and the Middle East, and the Far East as well for that matter, must acknowledge that the population of the regions is ambivalent about the role of Islam in government.  It seems that Muslims and Jews alike find it difficult to separate the religious tenets by which they govern themselves in their personal lives from those by which their nation governs them.  And in consequence of that unitary ethic as opposed to the binary ethic that prevails in The West, some effort must be made to create a new kind of governmental structure that can reconcile the two often times opposing types of political motivation: theocratic and secular.   Muslim fundamentalists on the extreme edges of Arab politics want the establishment of a Caliphate across the world by which all people will live by the principles of Islam essentially unchanged since the seventh century.  On the other hand, the vast majority of the world's population will not tolerate one.  So why not create a Caliphate that does exist all over the world, but not everywhere.  Why not create states within nations that are Muslim in their governance...that is regulated by Sharia Law...and allow them the kind of autonomy that exists in the fifty states in this country.  Let those who want to live that kind of fundamentalist Islamic life migrate to those states within their countries of origin--Pakistan, India, Malasia, Sudan, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and so on--and let the rest of us live the secular lives we wish to live.  Let the Taliban rule a portion of Afghanistan with a guaranty that anyone who doesn't want to live that way can leave unimpeded.  Let Hindu Indians leave the Muslim province and let Muslims emigrate from the Hindu and Christian provinces.  And in particular, let the Jewish province...Israel...exist as a Jewish state without interference.  It seems like a plan in which everyone gets what he wants without inflicting it on everyone else, but unfortunately, as I used to say to my children, we don't seem to be sufficiently evolved as a species to allow such a universal accommodation.  Maybe the military can do something about that...in Egypt anyway.

Your friend,

Mike