Arab Spring

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Tuesday 29th October 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Wakefield for securing this debate and introducing it with such wisdom. We need to remember that the Middle Eastern countries are negotiating several transitions: not just one from authoritarian regimes to democracy but from a pre-industrial to an industrial society, from a hierarchical to an egalitarian society and from a thoroughly and dogmatically religious to a moderately religious or secular society. The transition to democracy has to be seen in this wider context. Sometimes democracy gets blamed for things for which it is not responsible, because it has to pick up the pieces that the other transitions have provoked.

In this context, there is one important historical lesson to bear in mind, which I call the paradox of democracy. Wherever democracy has appeared, in the first few years you always tend to have this kind of discrimination against religious or ethnic minorities. I cannot think of one example to the contrary. There are two related reasons for this. First, with the rise of democracy, long-suppressed groups that have been denied their legitimate rights begin to claim them; once they have claimed them, the majority, which is not in the habit of conceding them, is forced to grant them, which leads to a certain amount of resentment.

However, there is also a deeper cultural process. When there is democracy, you require a sense of community, which has to be given an identity and defined in a certain way. The majority therefore has a tendency to claim the ownership of the country. I saw that in the case of India, where the Hindus will say, “This is our country, isn’t it? Muslims are simply here to live on our sufferance”. This happens in many places, where the majority begins to claim proprietary rights over a country; when it begins to do that, it defines the identity of the country in majoritarian or religious terms, with the result that religious minorities become the first casualty.

We need to remember the inner dynamics of what goes on. When discrimination takes place, as it is taking place in the aftermath of the Arab spring, it takes place either against other religions or against sects within one’s own. A classic example of the latter is what we saw in Bahrain. In 2011, the Government instituted the state of national safety law, under which the security forces detained and tortured thousands of Shia protestors. They destroyed Shia mosques and thousands were dismissed from public and private sector jobs. In Egypt, it has not taken that kind of form; by and large, it has been directed against Coptic Christians. Even there, it has been much more muted; nevertheless, it takes place.

In my remaining two minutes, I do not want to detail what goes on in different countries but to ask what we can do to address the problem. The first point to bear in mind—and here I introduce a note of slight disagreement with the right reverend Prelate—is that we should not single out a particular religious community. When the bishop said that as a Christian we would expect him to be concerned with Christians, I thought that, on the contrary, as a Christian I would not expect you to be concerned with Christians, who take all religious communities in their stride. I thought that the ecumenical state was inherent in Christianity. Of course, I understand what the bishop is saying, but I wanted to emphasise that singling out a particular religious minority, as we have tended to do, makes it a target in the eyes of the local community and makes our motives seem suspicious. We come to be seen not as genuinely concerned with religious minorities and their freedom but rather with one particular group.

Secondly, we need to bear in mind that these countries require a sympathetic understanding. In some cases, minorities may be discriminated against not because they are religious but because they were in league with the previous authoritarian regime or with outside powers, or are in command of resources and therefore resented not as a minority but as a particular class. Sometimes there are genuinely religious reasons why this is happening; the important thing therefore is to understand each situation in its own terms and not simply to generalise.

The third important thing to bear in mind is that Governments have limits, and we should work through NGOs in our own country as well as in the countries that we are trying to address. It is also important to bear in mind that religious conflicts by and large are never sui generis; they are never entirely religious in origin but have political and economic causes. The best way in which to solve them, as in the case of Lebanon, is through constitutional mechanisms, such as giving minorities adequate representation in the institutions of the state.

Finally, it is also important that, in so far as religious leaders have an important say, we find some way in which to get them together and get them to talk. I sometimes wonder why the Ditchley Park experiment, which we have tried in some situations, has not been tried in relation to foreign countries. I have attended a couple of sessions there with about 20-odd people from different walks of life who are interested in a common problem. They stay for three days, work and knock their heads together and arrive at some kind of mutual understanding. It ought to be possible to get religious leaders from Middle Eastern countries to travel to Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire to meditate together on problems of common interest. All this will work only if our own record is honourable. By and large, it is, but sometimes it is not. Unless we can say that we have treated our religious minorities with equality and justice, be they Muslims or others, we will not be able to lecture other countries.