Whereas the West views many Middle Eastern countries as medieval, Akyol said, Middle Eastern countries view the West as exploitative and hypocritical. He said the best way for Western countries to promote secularization in Middle Eastern countries is to remain principled and set an example through their actions.
The West does not think of Middle Eastern countries as “medieval,” for that would imply some progress from the beginning of Islam to a “medieval” period, when all further progress then stopped. From its beginnings, Islam’s texts have remained immutable, though Muslim societies and individuals have sometimes more, and sometimes less, hewed to the beliefs the Qur’an and hadith inculcate. The people in these countries are in thrall to an ideology that is both a religion and a politics, that attempts to regulate every area of life. The word “medieval” is used by some in the West to describe Islam not literally but rather, and accurately, to mean “backward,” “stuck in the past,” “incapable of change.”
Akyol continues:
“If the West wants to help in advancing human rights … they can do one thing and that is to be principled,” he said. “Do not use these concepts for colonial design, do not use these concepts sometimes only to advance the rights of your own people, do not use these concepts to bash the regimes that are your enemies, but then, when the same [violations of human rights] are committed by the regimes that are your allies, don’t look the other way.”
By using the telling phrase “colonial design,” Mustafa Akyol betrays more of his worldview than he likely intended. All those absurd charges by Arabs and Muslims about the damage inflicted on them by “Western colonialism,” or on “Palestinians” by the ”colonial state of Israel” (the Israelis being the colonizers, and the “Palestinians” the colonized) are summoned up. But the Arabs were among the peoples least affected by Western colonialism. It never touched the Arabian peninsula. The only Western interference there was the successful attempt, by the Royal Navy, to interdict the Arab trade in black African slaves. In Iran and Afghanistan, there were no European colonists. In Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, there were no European colonists, though there was a small European presence, which is a different thing. That is, there was no large-scale movement of Europeans into these territories to exploit their people and their resources. Both France and Great Britain held League of Nations Mandates — the U.K. for Iraq, and France for Lebanon/Syria. This meant they had committed themselves to the very opposite of what colonialists did. The duty they assumed as Mandatories was to bring these mandated territories successfully to statehood, as they did. Jordan was not colonized by Great Britain; rather, it came into existence because of the British. In North Africa, France had a limited presence, lasting only about 40 years in both Morocco and Tunisia. The only French colony, in the true sense of the term, was in Algeria, where the French did settle large numbers of people, and the French presence lasted from 1830 until 1962. The great imperialist power that ruled over the Arabs in both the Middle East and in North Africa was, for many centuries, Akyol’s own country, Turkey, in its Ottoman guise.
Akyol presumes to preach to the West about what it must do to help Muslim countries modernize. It should not use the absence of “human rights” as a reason for “bashing” certain other — that is, Muslim — countries. Why not? If Erdogan rounds up 100,000 Turks, and imprisons 50,000 of them without any semblance of due process, in a hysterical campaign against “Gulenism,” and also imprisons more journalists than any other country in the world, why shouldn’t the West criticize him? Wasn’t that criticism “principled”? Was Akyol glad or mad that the Americans made such a fuss over the imprisonment of Pastor Andrew Brunson? Does he consider that brouhaha to have been unacceptable “bashing” of Erdogan, or was it a “principled” stand for the rights of one man? Surely Akyol is pleased that the Europeans and Americans have severely criticized Saudi Arabia for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi? Isn’t that principled, especially if the West, as part of its protest, refuses to go through with tens of billions of dollars in arms sales to the Saudis? Have the Americans been wrong to criticize the ayatollahs and mullahs who are crushing the Iranian people? Wasn’t that “principled”? Wasn’t the American government being “principled” when it went to war, and spent $6 trillion in order to bring what it hoped would be reasonably-functioning democracies, with human-rights guarantees, to both Iraq and Afghanistan, that had endured the monstrous regimes of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban? It was naive, it was confused, it was a great waste in the end of American resources, but it was not “unprincipled.”
The greatest recent lapse in America’s record on “human rights” in Muslim countries concerns the regime of El-Sisi in Egypt. It is true that in 2017, the State Department did issue a report criticizing human rights abuses in Egypt. Some military aid was even withheld, and some non-military aid was cut that same year, but there has apparently not been any American pressure since then on El-Sisi. The military aid was restored in 2018 without, it seems, any request for a quid pro quo. But the American reluctance to come down hard on El-Sisi is not hypocrisy, as Akyol might see it, but reflects the keen awareness that in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, which just a few years ago was in power, remains a threat. El-Sisi does not want his country to have to endure another Mohamed Morsi, and his methods are harsh by Western, but not by Middle Eastern standards.
When Akyol deplores the use of “human rights” rhetoric by the Americans and other Westerners “to advance the rights of [their] own people,” I’m confused. Does he think the West is using “human rights” merely as a club to selectively, and therefore unfairly, “bash” only Muslims, and even then, only Muslims with which the West is not allied? Doesn’t he think we mean it? Haven’t Western governments raised human rights issues with many non-Muslim leaders, such as Duterte in the Philippines, Chavez and Maduro in Venezuela, Mugabe in Zimbabwe? And hasn’t the West also raised human rights issues, too, with Muslim states that are geopolitical allies, including Saudi Arabia (notably in the case of Raif Badawi) and Turkey (if we can optimistically still call Erdogan’s Turkey an ally)? Shouldn’t he welcome the West’s raising of the issue of human rights even if it “advances” the rights of “[its] own people”? And what does that mean? Akyol wants us to be “principled” but not, apparently, if being “principled” would mean advancing our own interests. We should be principled enough to not be principled, if invoking those principles could help us, which Akyol, in principle, deplores. Did you understand that last sentence? No, I didn’t either.