Scanning Al Jazeera this weekend for news of the Egyptian revolution now underway, I came across this conversation between Tariq Ramadan and Slavoj Zizek (video below). While the whole conversation is well worth twenty-five minutes of your life, the first few minutes of Zizek's impassioned description of events in Egypt I think make an excellent addendum to the conversation that is being had around an earlier piece I had written on the genetic origins of democracy.
What is so interesting in Egypt – beyond of course the fact that we get to watch people actually standing up for themselves – is that it is a very real study in the racism that masquerades itself as multicultural respect. This event represents explicitly how the narrative of cultural relativism, this claim that democracy is something culturally specific and not a universal value as some of us would have it, is in fact grounded in spurious assumptions and a sense of cultural superiority.
The narrative that is dominating much of the reporting of this revolution here in the West particularly is one of fear and suspicion...but not fear and suspicion of the Mubarak regime and its thirty years of repression and violence, but rather fear and suspicion of those who are rallying against it. We saw this in the first few days with the Obama administration’s initial reluctance to accurately describe Mubarak as a despot, to Israel’s current insistence that their own security must be safeguarded against a potential democratic Egypt, and finally to Tony Blair’s ridiculous assertion that the ‘West’ must is some way manage the process in Egypt so that the Egyptian people “will have a proper democracy” – implying of course that there is such thing as an improper democracy!
This narrative is grounded in the assumption that Egyptians, given the opportunity, would not want what we here in the West want when they demand freedom, dignity, and justice – that somehow these words mean something different to those gathered in Tahrir Square in Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt. The narrative is grounded in fear that, by virtue of the location they occupy on this planet, the language they speak, and the god they worship, Egyptians cannot possibly share a common understanding of what We understand to be democracy, and given the choice, Arabs, Muslims are incapable of making ‘correct’ decisions and would choose a radical theocratic regime.
And yet, what we see on the street stands almost comically in contrast to the underlying assumptions built into this narrative. As Zizek points out, this uprising puts the lie to this ‘truth’ and offers proof against the stereotype that democracy is somehow not a cultural trait of Muslims.
Indeed, what we see happening on the streets of Egypt, as before it in Tunisia, is the long-suppressed impulse towards the universal values of freedom, human dignity, and justice...the very same values that undergird our democracies here in the West.
