Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World by Fatima Mernissi, Mary Jo Lakeland Page A

then, are the prospects for a woman in an Arab society put to fire and sword in the name of international law and with the authorization of the Security Council of the United Nations! And what can be said when this is done by the very Western states that claim moral leadership of the world by forcing other nations to accept as universal the democratic model, which strips violence of all claim to legitimacy? Was this war inevitable? That is the question.
    Why is the promise of democracy so threatening to hierarchies, why is it so destabilizing to Asian and African regimes, and why does it rally the holders of power around the appeal to the old traditions? Is it because the idea of democracy touches the very heart of what constitutes tradition in these societies: the possibility of draping violence in the cloak of the sacred? The West began to be considered credible for leadership of the nations it had traumatized through its own colonial terror when it promised to condemn all violence against humanity as illegitimate. The democratic model constituted a break with the sorry world of internal and interstate massacres and pogroms because it stood against violence and its legitimation.
    Never had the Westerners, marked in the memory of the Third World by their past as brutal colonizers, succeeded in making themselves more credible as the bearers of good for other cultures than at the moment of the fall of the Berlin Wall. With the aid of the media, that event and the chain of falling despotisms which followed, especially the tragic and Ubuesque rout of Ceauçescu and above all the stillborn putsch in Moscow, stirred up a wind of long repressed hope in the Arab medinas. I remember the day when a fishmonger in the Rabat medina left me standing with my kilo of marlin in hand while he rushed to the neighboring shop, which had a television set, to hear the announcer report the capture of Nicolae and Elena Ceauçescu. When he returned after ten minutes and I expressed my displeasure to him at being abandoned, he gave me a reply that suggests what this moment meant to the masses: “I had the choice between serving you, which would have brought me forty dirhams [five dollars], and watching the apocalypse. Don’t you see that there is no comparison? Forty dirhams or the apocalypse? Who would choose forty dirhams? I am illiterate, Madame, but I can sense, just like you who are probably covered with diplomas, that history has come to a turning point.”
    The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the men, institutions, and symbols of the Eastern European despotisms were seen as having universal meaning, despite the fact that they were geographically and ethnically localized. It is true that only the Europeans, more exactly the Germans, were involved as actors. It was they whom we saw climb the wall, rejoice over the falling of that wall, break it into pieces, and wear those pieces as jewels, relics of demolished frontiers and of a ripped hijab (curtain, veil). If a child should play around at translating the expression “Iron Curtain” into Arabic, he would stumble on the word hijab and translate it as al-hijab al-hadidi. And he would be right, because the translation of the word “curtain” in the sense of something that divides space to impede traffic, is precisely hijab. 1 The shopkeepers in the North African medinas and the peasants in the Atlas Mountains had no trouble identifying with those young blonds of both sexes who were hugging, singing, and destroying the wall, drunk with freedom and the desire to put an end to authoritarianism. At the fall of the Berlin hijab a new word burst out in the medinas, a word as explosive as all the atomic bombs combined: shaffafiyya (transparency).
    Excluded from power and leading a life as mutilated as the arbitrary politics that crushes them is inefficient, Arab youths of both sexes were suddenly interested in those people of the North who shouted in the streets for liberty and justice.