"The democratic society and its enemies" in the Islamic world

Last week in Istanbul a very important meeting was held in which the military coup in Egypt was examined in all its dimensions and a strong sensitivity against coups and for freedoms in the Islamic world was demonstrated. One of the factors that made the meeting, held under the title "The World's Test in the Face of Coups Against the Will of the Peoples," important was that it took place with broad participation from every corner of the Islamic world and from every orientation, above all from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries, whose states had openly supported the coup.

The meeting, jointly organized by the General Secretariat of Muslim Thinkers, the Global Forum of Islamic Parliamentarians and the International Union of Muslim Scholars, chaired by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, was supported by Karamah for Human Rights from Geneva, the Cordoba Foundation from London and the Institute of Strategic Thinking from Turkey.

The meeting, at whose opening Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdağ also gave a speech, lasted two days with the participation of nearly three hundred people from all over the world, in sessions evaluating the development of democracy in the Islamic world and the threats to human rights and freedoms. The experiences of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Turkey and Malaysia were specifically examined. The possibilities of action and cooperation in favor of democratic development were evaluated in the face of the efforts carried out by supporters of the old regime and their international collaborators to reverse the Arab Spring process.

That the world stood by as a spectator in the face of coups, and indeed that many countries recognized the coup, willingly or in the name of a kind of realist foreign policy, was the main theme of the meeting. The world's most democratic countries did not even call the flawless coup in Egypt a coup. This emboldened the coup plotters even more and created in them a self-confidence that everything they would do under the heading of a coup would be tolerated. With this self-confidence they carried out massacres, opening fire in front of the world's eyes on people performing the dawn prayer. As they expected, or perhaps as they knew, as had been promised to them, silence was kept on this too. They went even further. By opening volley fire on the crowds filling Rabia Square they carried out in a single day the most savage slaughter recorded in the region's history, and the world could not even call this event a massacre, could not condemn it. The coup plotters counted themselves as having received more than the credit they needed. Then they launched an intense arrest campaign. Thousands of people were arrested without even any need being felt to give a reason. Where those arrested are, what they are charged with and when they will be brought to court is not even known, yet no proper voice is raised from the world against these crimes being committed. Apart from Turkey and Prime Minister Erdoğan, there seems to be no one in the world objecting to all this with a strong voice.

The conference was organized, in part as an answer to this silence, to show that peoples think differently from their states, for the most part by civil society organizations or parliamentarians from countries whose states had supported the coup or kept silent about it.

The meeting is a very important, historic initiative put forward in the name of Muslim peoples taking charge of their own will. I do not have much space left to go into the details of what was discussed at the meeting, but first of all, because of the title of the meeting, a point I must underline is this: of the apologetic attitude of many among the Muslim segments in the face of the questioning stance displayed for years under the heading of Islam and democracy, no trace remains any longer.

In fact, the title I personally proposed on behalf of the SDE for this meeting during the preparatory stages that began a month before the conference was "the democratic society and its enemies" in the Islamic world. Though it recalls the title of Karl Popper's famous book, by this I meant that the real enemies of democracy in Muslim societies are never Muslims, and that, strangely, those who try to prove that democracy and Islam are incompatible are the very active actors working for the development of democracy in the Islamic world. Indeed, today the picture has become clear in a very interesting way. In Egypt, in Tunisia and even in Turkey, while people with an Islamic worldview constitute the real dynamic of democratization, those who pass themselves off as Western secularists or liberals have turned coup-making into a political culture and habit. There is no need even to remind that the most important working group of the 28 February postmodern coup was of a "Western" character.

A second point is the reality of the Salafis that emerged with the meeting. Everyone in Egypt has the idea or perception that the Salafis supported the coup. This perception is not unjustified, given that the Nour Party sided with the coup. Yet to this anti-coup, pro-legitimacy meeting, five Salafi parties from Egypt alone attended at the level of party chairman and two at the level of deputy chairman. All of them tried to explain that they suffer greatly because of this created perception and how wrong and deliberately produced the idea is that the Nour Party unjustly represents all the Salafis. There is no Salafi party other than the Nour Party that supported the coup, and even it is thought to represent the whole movement judging by the 24 percent of the vote it got in the elections. Yet because of many mistakes it made soon after the elections, it had already lost most of its voter base. Hizb al-Nour is a party that has completely melted away during the coup process, not only at the base but even in the leadership ranks. If there were elections today, it is estimated that it could not get even 1 percent of the vote. Because almost all the Salafis are currently against the coup.

For them it is truly an unfortunate situation, because of this gulf between their perception and the facts, but it is worthwhile to correct this picture.