Around Democracy

Edward Said

(weekly.ahram.org; original link no longer available. 2003)

"As Arabs, I would submit, and as Americans we have too long allowed a few much-trumpeted slogans about "us" and "our" way to do the work of discussion, argument and exchange. One of the major failures of most Arab and Western intellectuals today is that they have accepted without debate or rigorous scrutiny terms like secularism and democracy, as if everyone knew what these words mean. America today has the largest prison population of any country on earth; it also has the largest number of executions than any country in the world. To be elected president, you need not win the popular vote but you must spend over $200 million. How do these things pass the test of "liberal democracy?"

So rather than have the terms of debate organised without scepticism around a few sloppy terms like "democracy" and "liberalism" or around unexamined conceptions of "terrorism", "backwardness" and "extremism", we should be pressing for a more exacting, a more demanding kind of discussion in which terms are defined from numerous viewpoints and are always placed in concrete historical circumstances. The great danger is that American "magical" thinking à la Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Bush is being passed off as the supreme standard for all peoples and languages to follow. In my opinion, and if Iraq is a salient example, then we must not allow that simply to occur without strenuous debate and probing analysis, and we mustn't be cowed into believing that Washington's power is so irresistibly awesome. And so far as the Middle East is concerned the discussion must include Arabs and Muslims and Israelis and Jews as equal participants. I urge everyone to join in and not leave the field of values, definitions, and cultures uncontested. They are certainly not the property of a few Washington officials, any more than they are the responsibility of a few Middle Eastern rulers. There is a common field of human undertaking being created and recreated, and no amount of imperial bluster can ever conceal or negate that fact."