Patrick L. Smith reads events in Turkey, Iran, and Egypt as a sign that “modernization has to be separated from Westernization if it is going to occur constructively from here on out”:
Making the two equivalent is a 500-year-old habit among Westerners, begun when Vasco da Gama landed in India in 1498.
My candidate for the greatest distinction of our time is that people will be able to become modern while keeping their own cultures, traditions, histories, values and so on. Can we explain the fate of Egypt’s Mohamed Morsi in any other context? A year ago the secularized elite despised the army and all the gore and repression it stood for. These same people now embrace the army because it removed from office a properly elected president who happens to be Islamic. This week the Army gave them what they apparently wanted: a new cabinet of 34, with not one member of an Islamic party in it.
In the end, one does not worry much about the emerging nations. They have the force of history at their backs. Modernizing without Westernizing is what the concept of Islamic democracy is all about, for instance. It is a search for institutions that are built by, and reflect, the people who are going to live by them. “Inevitable” is not too strong a term for this process, hard and long and full of reversals as it will prove to be.
The Dish 