NED Events >> Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim Discusses Prospects for Civil Society in Egypt
Read the transcript of Saad Eddin Ibrahim’s remarks.
Q&A with Saad Eddin Ibrahim and Barbara Ibrahim.

Q&A with Saad Eddin Ibrahim and Barbara Ibrahim
May 15, 2003 Luncheon Discussion

NED President Carl Gershman:
I’m going to take the liberty of the chair to ask one quick opening question, and then I’ll recognize people. Saad, when you were first arrested, we had an event here in Washington over at SAIS [the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies] where three Egyptians came over who you know well: Negad al-Bourai, Hafez Abu Seada, who runs the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, and also Mohammed Zarea, who runs a center for assistance to prisoners in Egypt. And at that meeting, Mohammad said there were 14,000 political prisoners in Egypt. He also talked about the problem of torture and the problem of disappeared as well. You spoke about other prisoners. Can you give us your understanding of the extent to which there are political prisoners in Egypt and how many there are and what needs to be done?

Saad Eddin Ibrahim [SEI]:
Well, nobody knows for sure. First of all, our official records and official spokesmen do not admit there is any political prisoners in Egypt. There is not such a thing in our legal code. Nowadays it’s called political crime. So, every crime that you and I would recognize as a political crime is always made a criminal case. So, I was never a political prisoner. I was an offender, a thief, a fraud, a traitor, but not a political prisoner—no. So, on one level there is no political prisoners, but if you ask me honestly how many, I will tell you at least 30,000. How do I know that? Because the prison I was in had 500 inmates. Three hundred of those inmates were Islamic activists. Some were violent, like the Jihadis Islamic group. Some were nonviolent, like the Muslim Brothers. But if that is a representative—and the prison I was in is one of 44 prisons that exist in Egypt—if you have that as a sample, then the figure 30,000 is broadly an understatement, and I’d rather err on the side of conservative figures, because I don’t want to be unfair also to my country.

And by the way, despite the ordeal of three years, the fact that I am acquitted and acquitted by the High Court shows that there is a margin of freedom which you can fight, and we are determined to use that margin and expand it. So, there is again the High Court in Egypt as part of the legacy of that liberal age. We have two systems of judiciary laws: the one that condemned me and put me in prison and the one that got me out. That one that got me in, every time my case [was] looked at it was in state security courts. And state security courts were created after 1950 to protect “the revolution,” the national security. That’s how they got their name. These are operating outside the normal regular court system. And it is up to the government who to try you before. So, whenever there is an opportunity to be tried by the state security, there is 90 percent probability that you will end up in prison or disappeared. When you go to the appeal court, or to the highest court of the land, which is called the Court of Cassation, then you really have a fair chance, and that is how I ended up. But it took two and a half years before I got to that level. And in my trial, which is something that I to say in praise of that part of the Egyptian judiciary system, they were fair. They were very impressive. There were nine judges on the bench, and they listened very carefully and took note very carefully. They challenged the prosecutor and also my own defense on the facts. Apparently they had read better. The judges had studied the case much better than the defense lawyer and the prosecutor. [It] impressed me. I couldn’t believe it—that here is the chief judge of the highest court in the land, who has studied not only the file but also my writing, and he was asking the guy, “Did you read his book on such and such?” and the guy was standing back, because he had not read the book, of course—probably never read anything [of mine]. But I felt that whatever this court does with me, I will accept it, because at least they studied the file, they checked the facts, they read everything I said, or nearly everything I said, and they were alert. And when they acquitted me, and two weeks later they issued the reason for that, it is a masterpiece. I couldn’t have written anything like it.

Talking about the statement they made, you read the Court of Cassation’s acquitting statement. It is 35 pages, calling the government on its fabrication, on the trumped-up charges against me. But more important than the acquittal was the argument of how each one of these charges infringed and violated a constitutional right: the right to do research, the right to express research findings in publications, both internally and externally—anywhere—because one of my charges was that I defamed Egypt’s name outside of Egypt. And if you are in the outside world, and it turns out that it’s a conference you attended, some at NED, or the National Defense College—you know you could never know exactly what that means. So, the court challenged the state on that. And thirdly and very importantly is the principle to receive grants from any source domestically and internationally so long as it is lawful, so long as it’s for a peaceful and legitimate purpose.

These three principles to me are as important [as], if not more important than, the acquittal, because they give civil society organizations a shot in the arm. They revive their hope to be able to be tested. The principles have not been tested, and our government had sometimes ignored whatever the courts issued. But we’re hoping that we will take the opportunity to affirm those principles in action by reopening Ibn Khaldoun, by encouraging others to do likewise.

Finally, the court critiqued the political system. This was new. This is beyond the court, and we did not expect it. Nobody had expected the court to take the time to critique the Egyptian political system, to note the following: that the executive branch of government has increasingly and progressively encroached on both the judiciary and the legislature. Secondly, and more dangerously, noting that within the executive branch the presidential power has become imperial, that nothing happens in the capital now without a presidential edict or a presidential blessing. This kind of thing, to be said by the highest court in the land, is powerful but also gives us hope that there are institutions left with legacies from the liberal age that must be protected, must be recognized, must be praised. Just as we criticize, we have to praise. This is something I learned in my human rights tradition—that as you criticize a formal practice, also praise a fair practice.

Q:
One thing is that it’s such a joy to have you here. In this room, we have welcomed a number of people like yourself and celebrated their freedom, and this is one of those occasions, and thank you for your comments. I have two items that I would love to hear your comments on: one is that you referred to your international support that you received and also you commented about Hashem Aghajari. I wondered how you evaluate the role of the new technologies in terms of bringing attention and solidarity to cases such as yours on the one hand, to advocacy cases, and also to exchange of opinion and to exchange of strategy for democracy building. And the second matter that I would love to hear your comments on is this: You may have seen the new World Values Survey. Foreign Policy just had an article on it. It refers to the fact that, unlike what has been said a lot recently, people in the Muslim world in fact value democracy as an aspiration as much as, and sometimes even more than, people in other parts of the world. Where they fall is when it comes to issues of gender and culture. And whether you think that that is at the heart of our struggle for democracy—that is, the egalitarian aspects of inclusiveness when gender and the minorities come in. Thank you.

SEI:
Thank you very much. I will let Barbara answer the first question, because once I went to prison, I had no benefit of the value of the new technology. We were not allowed to use computers or email or Internet in prison, as you could imagine. So, Barbara has probably more to say on this.

Barbara Ibrahim:
When Saad was arrested late one night in June of the year 2000, I happened to be out of Cairo, and I had just by chance picked up and taken my laptop with me, even though it was a weekend away from the office. And it was a good thing, because when I returned, our home computer, all of Saad’s papers, his telephone books—everything—had been confiscated. So, from this laptop computer that was my sole source of information, we started to build, in the beginning, a very small [group] of very interested and likeminded friends both inside Egypt, in the Arab world, and outside. My son, who is much more technologically adept than I am, certainly, got a petition going and started sending it to his young circle of friends, and each one of them had an address book of 50 or 100 Arab friends. And so, very quickly, this young Arab response and information about the case got underway. We felt that it was important to have a Web site, to have a place that we could store information, that we could counter some of the things that were said in the official press in Egypt. So, again, with the help of family members who were outside of the country, we established both an Arabic and an English Web site, had a listserv that, at one time, had over 1,000 names on it. These are the kinds of things that couldn’t have happened even five years ago—that kind of instantaneous ability to mobilize networks and to get information out and to supersede and to overrun attempts by official media to print only one side of the story. The sad downside to that is that we could never get one retraction of misinformation, even when it appeared in semi-official government papers. They would never print a correction. What is called the opposition press in Egypt, unfortunately, is not as free to speak out as they might be. So, in Arabic or in the print media or in broadcasting, we had very little opportunity for people to hear both sides of the story.

SEI:
As for your second question, I was going to speak on that tomorrow; you’re stealing the thunder out of my work. No, no, I fully agree. There are two reports that really made a lot of difference in the last year. One was a UN Arab Human Development Report, which was authored by some 13 Arab social scientists and experts, in which they attributed the lag of the Middle East and Arab countries behind the rest of the world economically and in every possible area of development to three deficits. The first deficit was freedom and democracy. The second deficit was gender and equality. And the third was deficit in knowledge and technology. And so long as the three deficits are there, the region will remain lagging behind and will decline even more. And with that decline there will be more discontent, more disgruntled younger people, and people that I indicated would end up in the hands of angry Islamic militants. The call for violence will be very appealing to them, and they will lash at their own regimes, and if they don’t get anywhere, they will lash at Western regimes that are supporting their autocratic regimes. That is a fact. The second important report that came was the World Values Survey. Are you all familiar with the World Values Survey? The World Values Survey is an important social science exercise that started some 28 years ago by the University of Michigan Institute of Social Research, and they began by reviewing and studying values in Western democracies, especially in Western Europe, which was very keen on finding how much differences there are among members of the European Community. But in the last 10 years, they began to go outside Western countries to Asian countries and Latin American countries, and the last expansion of that survey was to Muslim countries. And Ibn Khaldoun was a part of that from the beginning. They came to us and we agreed to conduct the survey in Egypt, in Jordan, and in Iran, and we had a series of meetings, and then I was taken to prison. Luckily, one of my colleagues took over and continued the exercise, and we finally did, not only in the three countries of Egypt, Jordan, and Iran, but we added also Morocco and Palestine. Those five countries, even though they may not be representative of all the Muslim countries, they are weighty enough to give you a very good feel of how the Muslims—and as you indicated, in all the indicators of freedom and democracy, the Muslim world ranked similar and sometimes slightly higher than the West. The only area where that did not occur is in the strictly, narrowly defined, social order of gender, of sexual preferences, of family and abortion. They were half of the world average. But this did not disturb me at all, since I suspected it. That survey conducted in the West even 40 years ago would have gotten the same percentages. You will have not really moved to be tolerant with, you know, homosexuality and abortion until probably the last 20 years. But we still were probably where the West was on these social values 50 years ago. But on the political values, democratic values, we were up there, probably because people are deprived of it. They valued it even more than the Western countries.

Q:
So, it won’t surprise you, Saad, that I have a question about how democracy might come into being in Egypt. A growing number of people in the U.S. are convinced that it would be in the national interest of the U.S., not to mention of the people of Egypt, for Egypt to become a democracy. But many of them who want to see that happen worry about the problem to which you repeatedly referred—of antidemocratic forces in the country that might have the leg up in mobilizing politically and electorally if there were a rapid and particularly sudden opening, the most prominent of which, but I suspect not the only of which, are the various forms of Islamic radicals, liberals, fundamentalists. So, there is one problem or concern in terms of how democratization could happen—how it could be sequenced, what a time table of political liberalization in stages might look like, so that moderate forces that are democratic, both secular and democratically Islamist, might be able to successfully compete and the political opening of Egypt would not lead to something like what happened in Iran. And related to this is the question, which I am really having greater difficulty imagining, as to how the current regime can be induced or persuaded to embark on such a strategy when, as you know, all the political tendencies of the leadership in Egypt have been moving in the reverse direction.

SEI:
Well, thank you, and I’m so happy that you made it to Washington while I’m here. Larry [Diamond] is an old friend, a comrade in fighting for democracy. You are raising real concerns. Concerns that I have, you have, that many of us have in the region. But my point, and I hope I have succeeded in conveying that, is that these are obstacles that could be overcome. And if you are an activist, then there is no doubt of your activism, that you believe in change, in the possibility of the change, in the desirability of the change, and you work for it. So, yes, your concerns are quite real, and we share them, but let me just make two points. One, that this fear-arousal approach used by the Islamists is often raised not only in regard to Iran but with regard to Algeria, and you know very well that Algeria never really had the opportunity to test that proposition. Yes, FIS [the Islamic Salvation Front] did very well in the election, but they were never allowed to get into power or to test that proposition that became so popular—the one-man, one-vote, one-time. We don’t know if that would have happened in Algeria, because both the army and the president could have dissolved the parliament had it reneged on rules of the democratic game. So, Algeria, which is often raised not only by your leaders but by our leaders. This fear-arousal in Iran, if you are referring to the Islamic regime—that did not come through democracy. It came through a popular revolution that was basically hijacked by the most organized group at the time, the Mullahs and their supporters. So, but when the Iranians were given a fair chance, they voted the reformists in, and they will continue to do so if they have the chance. And this gentleman, Dr. Hashem, he got into trouble because he challenged the clergy. So, I don’t want Algeria or Iran to be used as negative examples. We hear that all the time from some of our leaders, every time we raise that question. “Oh, you want us another Algeria?” “You want us another Iran?” A third negative reference point is the Soviet Union. At the time, the Soviet Union was really in a mess. But this is a fear-arousing that is often used by antidemocratic forces, especially those who are in power, or by old-time orientalists here in the West. No, we challenge that. We know it could be changed. We know we have had liberal ages, liberal experiments throughout the Middle East, from Iran to Morocco, from one time to another, and it was fine, including Iraq. Iraq had a liberal democracy in the inter-war period. It’s true the British were still there. It’s true it was a monarchy, but they had a better system, more pluralistic, which the Kurds, the Shiites, the Sunni, the Turkmen, the Christians—all participated in. It was truly pluralistic. It wasn’t a Westminster democracy, but it was far better than the previous Ottoman rule, far better than what came after 1958 and which ended with Saddam Hussein being in power for 30 years. So, let us give democracy a chance. Let us nurture it. Let us be patient. And one other thing you are asking me: if I had a time table, I would start with doing away with emergency laws, freeing the media, having constitutional reform, and then after having that infrastructure put into place—a democratic infrastructure—then I would move and have elections. I’m not in a hurry. I mean, democracy should not be reduced to just elections. There is more to it, and you know that very well. You have been teaching us about it. So, yes, there is a growing literature about transitology. Let us learn from it and craft a charter, or a road map, for every country. We don’t have to do a uniform one for the entire Middle East or Muslim world. And don’t forget that two of the biggest countries now, Indonesia and Bangladesh, have had now periodic elections. They are not perfect, but they are far better than the dictatorships that had existed in both countries.

Barbara Ibrahim:
I think we would also add our voices to those who are reminding everyone that democracy is so much more than electoral politics and that you have to think about the institution of the media, of education. Young people have to be given roles in their society. They have to practice participation so that they can grow up to be citizens who take an interest and a stake. And also that the choices Arabs make may not be American-style democracy. They may turn to Scandinavia as a system that they think has a better balance of social justice with electoral freedom. So, I think we need to not be arrogant about telling someone else how to do democracy, but to let it flourish.

Q:
I just wanted to ask whether the High Court statement on your case has been published in English?

SEI:
Yes, it has. It is on our Web site, and Barbara can tell you how to get to it, and I’ll also leave a copy of that statement in English with NED.

Barbara Ibrahim:
I’m embarrassed to say that the Arabic original is not yet loaded on the Web site; it will be, as soon as we overcome a technological problem. But the English is now loaded at www.democracy-Egypt.org, which is also an archive now for all the major documents, both the court documents, human rights statements, press coverage, both inside and outside Egypt, for the case. At one time it was getting about 40,000 visits a month, if you want a sense of how electronic media might make a difference. And, of course, anything that was posted there was picked up by the whole network of human rights and civil society organizations all over the world, many of whom have representatives in the room today.

Q:
I’m Michael Miklaucic with USAID. You may have been getting towards the answer to this question, but very specifically, could you comment on the impact that official U.S. interventions on your behalf had specifically on the outcome of your case and, more generally, the impact of those interventions in terms of the U.S. as a credible catalyst for progressive change in the Arab world?

SEI:
In the beginning, the intervention, especially the highly publicized intervention by President Bush in the letter suspending the Egyptian request for additional aid—that seemed in the short run to be counterproductive. In the long run, it has helped my agenda and it has helped me. But in the acquittal, it was purely judiciary, and I can testify to that, and this is one of the prides of liberal Egypt in which that court was created in liberal Egypt and continued that tradition of independence and dignity. As a matter of fact, the ruling was very badly received by those who fabricated the case against me. Because in Egypt, like anywhere else, the government is not monolithic. There are wings that are very enlightened and very progressive-looking. And there are others, like the Old Guard, who are very security- and control-oriented. And they don’t want change. They want to maintain the status quo, because that is what they benefit from. That struggle is taking place in nearly every Arab country, in nearly every Middle Eastern country—in Iran, in Morocco—everywhere. In our case, there is that margin, and that margin was used. However, what the U.S. pressure did was to put the issues for which we were fighting on the agenda, and one—or three of the positive fallouts from my whole ordeal was the following: One is the announcement by the government that they will do away with the State Security clause—very infamous, and has a bad name inside and outside of Egypt. So, they declared their intention to do away with it. I hope that it will be carried out. It hasn’t yet been implemented; it is an intention, a declared intention. Second positive fallout was the appointment of a woman to the Supreme Court—a woman judge for the first time in our history. Third positive fallout was instituting the Coptic Christmas as a national holiday for the first time in 1,400 years. Islam came to Egypt back in 671, and the Copts have never been able to get their major holiday, Christmas, as a national holiday. Now, this year only, in the year 2003 and on the day of my third trial, because it happened to be January 7. And the fourth fallout was to establish a High Commission on Human Rights, and the membership of which will be state as well as non-governmental public figures. So, this makes whatever sacrifices we made as a family or what the Ibn Khaldoun researchers went through—it made it worth while. And that is a message for every freedom fighter around the world—that if you persist and if you get the world to take note, you’ll ultimately triumph. It happened to in the Soviet Union. It happened in the Philippines. And thanks to NED for always taking care of many of us.

Q:
I’m going to take Michael’s question a bit further, but before I do so, I want to say what a great personal pleasure it is to see you here in the same or even better form than we last saw you. It’s wonderful. I want to take his question a bit further and ask you, I know that you’re going to be meeting with people in the State Department during this visit, and given the long and close alliance between the U.S. and Egypt, what policy recommendations will you be making to these people, in terms of steps beyond the interventions that were made in your particular case, that will encourage Egypt to democratize?

SEI:
Thank you, Judy. Judy Barsalou is also an old friend and an early supporter of Ibn Khaldoun during her tenure at the Ford Foundation as a program officer in Cairo. I think, again, that you’re asking a very important question, and I’ll tell you what we have been saying since the beginning of the day to both congressional leaders as well as to national security advisors: consistency and sustainability in everything that Americans say they hold dear to their hearts—values of freedom and democracy. You need to be consistent across the board, to do it everywhere; otherwise there is always a ready accusation of double standards. And sustainability—to have a staying power whether you’re calling for peace, for democracy, for freedom, for open society. Don’t have the short attention span that has often been typical of many American policies. Thirdly, is to have conditionality. Middle Eastern countries are eager for aid and trade with the U.S., and it is very legitimate to do so. Development is one of the three things we’re fighting for—democracy, peace, and development. But, here is a chance and here is an opportunity to say, “Fine, let us have a time table. Let’s have a timetable for democratic reform.” Becoming democratic is not impossible. I know, you know, that some hundred countries over the last 30 years, since the Portuguese Revolution back in 1974, have democratized, have changed, have transformed from autocratic rule to democratic rule. So, we have this cross-cultural, cross-religious, cross-national—every conceivable type of autocracy has been turned into a democracy, and there are four or five different types. Professor [Samuel] Huntington, in his good writings, has referred to them, in his “third wave” of democracy work. So, there it is, and it is not a mystery, and what is needed to be done is very clear: to do away with emergency laws, to free the media, to create a robust judiciary, to have a vibrant civil society, to allow them to be free and flourish like they did in the liberal age. These are things that must be done. And you can ask countries to do their own timetable over the next five years, ten years. And don’t abolish trade or aid or make it totally contingent on that timetable. But tie every reward, just like you do with children, is to say, “Well, if you do this, I will do this.” Give them sort of a modulated, graduated way of changing, because the first thing they will say is, “We’re different. Our culture is different. Our people are different.” Some of us who have lived there, who know the real thing, realize that these arguments [are] sometimes believed naively by our Western friends here. It isn’t true. Everything could be changed. Yes, it may take time. It needs patience, some craftsmanship, and framing, but it could be done, and it should be done. And I hope you’ll do it. And I hope there will be persistence. I hope there will be some toughness also on the Arab-Israeli conflict, because that is always something every autocratic leader has used to deflect attention from more pressing internal issues. And there was a saying in Nasser’s days: “No voice should be louder than the voice of liberating Palestine.” And, in those days, people of course all believed him and endorsed that. However, every autocratic leader that came after Nasser has used that, whether he had any intentions to help the Palestinians or not, but has used it to remain in power. And, therefore, one way of undermining this kind of argument is to deal with it forcefully. We know this is a very complex issue. We know it’s a very sensitive issue in the U.S. We know the competing forces, but I think right now with one threat that is gone—i.e., the Iraqi threat that Israel was quite legitimately worried about—now the Israeli public, if you read the public opinion polls that are taken periodically in Israel, and the Palestinians, who are also being polled all the time, are both ready for a historical compromise. So, let us again take advantage, be a little bit tougher, tell policymakers to be tough with General, or President, or Prime Minister Sharon. They have to be. They have to give that impression that they are serious. And I think the Palestinians have matured a lot the last 20 years, especially the last three years, since the Camp David and the Taba agreements fell by the wayside. Now there is genuine regret that they did not take the opportunity. However, who is responsible for foiling this, I don’t know—I was in prison—but that was an opportunity that should not have been wasted.

Barbara Ibrahim:
The other message that Saad is giving—and as an American it seems particularly an important one to me—is that sometimes the voice out of Washington appears very arrogant, appears to be telling people what to do. And this is a time in the Arab world were there is a sense of failure, frustration, and humiliation. It is a time to be humble now and to ask Arabs what they need, to listen, to build those kinds of bridges that don’t appear to be imposing. And I think that coming from Saad it’s a very important message. The second one is that it’s about time that this place stops trying to go it alone, starts recognizing the international community, doing things collectively. Ideas like democracy will be so much more palatable to Arabs, given the history of foreign relations with this country through their collective endeavors; we hold hands with Europeans and Japanese and Australians and others in building these kinds of institutional bridges.

Q:
My name is Lynn McDonald. I’m with the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center. We’re concerned with developing free and independent trade unions around the world. I wanted to pick up on a question that was begun by my seatmate here and to which you began a response, and it’s about gender equality, or trends towards gender equality that you see emerging in the region, and how these trends could be capitalized upon internally/externally by our network of support organizations. And I should mention that I’m asking this as a trade unionist and not as a woman, because we want to continue to pursue the principles of organized labor. Thank you.

SEI:
Well, labor unions have been at the forefront of fighting for democracy in our history, especially during the liberal age. However during the populist age, after 1952, they were told, “We will give you rights and even more rights than what you’re asking for, but don’t organize independently.” So, the trade unions or labor unions have become like other civil society organizations: an empty shell. Leaders are “appointed” or “elected” formally in the same way that others of our officials are elected, and they stay in power for as long as the president stays in power. Some of the leaders—I know this has happened in the U.S., it is happening—but, you know, trade unions in some of the Arab world countries, like Sudan, for example, like Morocco, were very powerful, and in Egypt until 1952. And there were schools for training people into collective action and collective work, and women always had a role in that cause. They were workers, starting in cigarette factories and garment factories, and even today, under populist regimes, the regime makes a token support of women to serve on the board. But more genuinely is, if we have a free trade union movement, you will find more women taking their place in society at large and in the labor movement in particular. The key is free organizing. You know, the way trade unions now are in a number of Arab countries, they are almost organized like the one-party system, very pyramidical. The outspoken labor leaders—men or women—are co-opted, not only by being more or less placed and therefore elected by the administration, but giving them official positions in government. So, you find that the head of the labor movement becomes the Minister of Labor, so once he has that other hat as a cabinet member, you can bet he will not pay serious attention to the labor movement demands, and that has happened in Egypt, in Syria, in Iraq, and elsewhere. So, as much as we want democracy for the society at large, we want a union democracy, and therefore a real competitive labor movement, and in that, women will find their rightful place.

Q:
I hope that we’ll have more chance to ask more questions and debate tomorrow night, but I have one comment and one question I want to make. First of all, I’m very humbled to be in your presence today, and touched by your comments. I’m humbled anytime I’m in the presence of someone who spent some time in jail. I think Amnesty International estimates that there are 250,000 political prisoners in the Arab world; I saw that last year, I think. So, that’s a very large number, and I would hope that you continue to speak up about the issue of political prisoners, not only in Egypt but throughout the Arab world. On the question of the timeline, I believe in a timeline, and we need a timeline, but I’m really concerned that the governments will use that timeline to make it very long and extended until we all forget about it. Nobody in the Arab world says they are against democracy. The governments and the regimes that will say, “Yes, we believe in democracy, but we have to do it step by step,” that’s what they’ve been saying for the last 20 years. You know, they say, “Yeah, we have a timeline, it may take 100 years, but we have a timeline.” Some really would caution you about, you know, if there is a timeline it doesn’t have to be that long. That’s my point. It can be done very quickly, and there are many examples in Eastern Europe where the transition happened rather quickly. The final question is about how we can build a strong and democratic front between moderate Islamists and moderate secularists; I think that gap has to be bridged in order to build a strong front for democracy. Thank you very much.

SEI:
Well, Radwan [Masmoudi], I would make the timetable contingent on aid conditionality. If you want 100 years, then we will not give you aid until 100 years. Will not give you a single arm of whatever until the timetable is finished. That is a way to get around it. If it is a pretext to delay, then other Western democracies have certain cards that must be played and played for good reasons, for change. They have played them for other reasons that we all suffered from. Now is the time to use this conditionality with trade and foreign aid for the good of the people and of the country, of the enlightened self-interest of the West, because, after all, it isn’t just us that will benefit from it as a society, but also Western powers. As I said, the only alternative to Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein is democracy, is Ibn Khaldound, is your center. And you won’t be only serving an ideal, a value that we all share, but you will also be serving the enlightened self-interest of the Western democracies. As for the other suggestion, what we’re doing—the experiment we’re doing with the dialogue—is to help Islamists evolve. We have seen enough evidence that they want to participate in the democratic game, and when they do, they moderate, because once you run for elections, for example, you need votes. And, therefore, you put aside your very purist, ideological line and you start dealing with people’s concerns, and once you deal with people’s concerns, you have to be pragmatic, you have to be moderate. And we have seen that happen. I have seen that happen in Egypt and elsewhere—in Jordan, for example. When Jordan started its democratic experiment, I was part of it, because I was living in Jordan at the time. I was asked by King Hussein a number of times to give some advice, and I gave advice, and I wrote a paper that really became very instrumental in the change and the transition. And I don’t usually like to brag about this, but this is something I’m very proud of. And he was a very enlightened monarch who took me seriously. I wish my government took me as seriously as King Hussein did. He also had the same fear—of How can we do it?—because I kept going around and around without uttering the word democracy. “Could you be meaning democracy?” [he asked]. I said, “Yes, your majesty.” He said, “Why didn’t you say that?” I said, “Your majesty, I’ve been working with the Crown Prince Hassan, and every time I mentioned the word democracy, he jumped, so I didn’t want to mention it.” And he laughed at his younger brother for being jumpy at the word democracy. “No, no. Here you can say whatever you want to say.” And so, I said, “Yes, yes, your majesty, democracy.” And he said, “But what do we do with the Muslim Brothers?” The same concern that everybody was voicing here. I said, “Let them and other political forces like the Marxists, the Baathists, and every political force in Jordan sign a national charter that they will not tamper with the rules of the democratic game.” The thing that should have been done in Algeria, in order to allay the fear, in order to ward off the one-man, one-vote, one-time system. So, he asked me to do some more work. So, with pleasure, I did it, even though I had a broken leg at the time. I was in a cast. I was flown back from Egypt to Jordan, but I did it with great pleasure. And the beautiful thing about the Jordanian regime—you know, many people don’t have kind words to say about it, but I did because I dealt with them—is that he listened, he asked for more questions, and than he asked me to write a working paper. I did write this working paper. We did manage to get that conference together for all the political forces in Jordan, and they all signed that national charter. Later on, about a year later, Moroccans did the same thing. And I must say, the monarchs in the Arab world are far more enlightened, to my surprise at the time. When these people really intend to reform, they read the writing on the wall, faster than their counterpart in the republics, and they all abide by it. And sure enough, the first election was held that same year, and it came after the food rioting in Mayan, one of the strongholds of the Hashemite family. They held the elections, and the Islamists had the biggest block, and they had several representatives in the cabinet, and they overplayed their hand, and they turned people against them, so in the following elections, they lost the share they had. The number of seats that they had was cut into half, and therefore, in the third election they really moderated, and they have been playing very responsively since then. So, I’m saying democracy has this self-correcting mechanism. So, let us just give it a chance.

As for Ibn Khaldoun International, we will of course welcome any ideas. We have intention of reopening Ibn Khaldoun. Ibn Kahldoun, I must say, for those of you who don’t know, was sealed by the State Security forces and was guarded for nearly three years, but when we got our acquittal, they removed the wax and they removed the guards. When we got to the building, it was almost like the National Museum in Baghdad—completely sacked, completely vandalized. Nothing was left there intact. It was a very sad sight for me, having built this center, and for many of those who came to inspect it. So, we have a lot of work physically to clean up the premises, to rebuild it. And then we have even the tougher job of fundraising. We have been out of circulation a number of years, and we need our friends. I have a tentative two- or three-page proposal that I’m going to give to my friends at NED, and you’re all a witness—transparency! I’m glad you raised that question. So, if we have the resources and the manpower… You know, I am three years…it is a good chunk of your life, and your health. I’m not as strong as I used to be. I’m hoping there will be another generation to take over, and to carry on, and I’m going to look for them, and I hope I find them. I have confidence that I’ll find them. And we’re open to any idea, including internationalizing the activities and hooking up and networking with likeminded, in the region and in the U.S. And, equally important, we want an alliance of a coalition of the willing—willing for democracy, not for war. Yes, across Atlantic, because we discovered during our ordeal, our fight, that it was really the international support that sustained us and gave us strength. And, as Barbara said, thanks to the technological communication innovation that made the world be a small place. So, we are open and we are willing.

Carl Gershman:
Well, Saad, I first of all want you to know that when you used the language like “coalitions of the willing” and “transatlantic cooperation” and “networks in the Middle East,” you’re talking our language. And anything that we can do to try to help build that, we’re going to do. And I also think that the opportunities for that at this moment are greater than ever before. I mean, when you were arrested, I wouldn’t have said that, but I think that today there are possibilities that were not there before. Saad mentioned the problem of refurbishing the Ibn Khaldoun Center. I think he said earlier that the date of June 30, which is the third anniversary of his arrest, is the date when you plan to officially reopen the Ibn Khaldoun Center to business. And it is also, I think you said, the fifteenth anniversary of the center. So, that’s a very important date in democracy. We’ll remember that, and everyone take note of it. And this was a terrific session. And it was not just a joy to have you with us but really an edifying experience, so thanks to you and Barbara for a wonderful session.

|