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Olde Tyme Religion
Prof. Bernard Lewis:Don't push for democracy in MidEast
2011-04-03
Interesting interview with the dean of the Orientalists. Including several palpable hits against the New York Time's tradition of determined ignorance, parochial naivete and gullibility. In this broad-ranging interview, Professor Lewis also talks about the impact of female repression, how to handle Iran, and the problem of Turkey and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.
"I think that the tyrannies are doomed," Mr. Lewis says as we sit by the windows in his library, teeming with thousands of books in the dozen or so languages he's mastered. "The real question is what will come instead."

For Americans who have watched protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, Libya, Bahrain and now Syria stand up against their regimes, it has been difficult not to be intoxicated by this revolutionary moment. Mr. Lewis is "delighted" by the popular movements and believes that the U.S. should do all it can to bolster them. But he cautions strongly against insisting on Western-style elections in Muslim lands.

Elections, he argues, should be the culmination—not the beginning—of a gradual political process. Thus "to lay the stress all the time on elections, parliamentary Western-style elections, is a dangerous delusion."

In Middle Eastern history "consultation is the magic word. It occurs again and again in classical Islamic texts. It goes back to the time of the Prophet himself," says Mr. Lewis.
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