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Intelligence Squared Debates - BETTER ELECTED ISLAMISTS THAN DICTATORS


I actually don't think that this question can be answered simply.  I generally tend towards elected Islamists, because people generally grow to hate any government in charge of them.  People always expect the world.  Their expectations are set so high that no government can satisfy them.  On top of that, there are various scandals that come to light, and Islamist governments are sure to keep their populations in dire poverty, through lack of scientific education and an aversion of others to those regimes.  Thus, I feel that if only Islamists stay in power for long enough (and democracy survives for that long), the people will end up hating them one way or another.  Whether they go to an even more radical group or a more liberal group is uncertain, but there has to be a point at which their government becomes the most radical.  At some point, people will get fed up.  (Although that could be after a few genocides.)

On the other hand, I note that not all dictators are equal, and some people who are sometimes referred to dictators were able to accomplish great things...things that a more "average Joe/Yusuf"-oriented democracy wouldn't have been able to bring about.  The shining example is Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.  As its first president, he led the new Republic of Turkey from its founding to his death 15 years later.  In that time (and before the republic was declared), he held more power than almost any president around today.  And he was able (along with others, of course) to transform Turkey into a secular nation.  Even more than that, he was able to secularize the populace and overall culture of the nation.  It wasn't a complete success, and there are still many problems in Turkey (see this from  - https://plus.google.com/107063016069778460948/posts/KT6hZ6Ghj9N).  However, it still compares very well to nearly any other nation with an overwhelmingly Muslim population.

The problem with more recent dictators was that they were not secular.  They might have been known as secular to many, but they weren't truly so.  They say that Ba'athists like Saddam Hussein and Bashar al Assad (who are quite different from each other, in fact) have "secular" governments.  That's patently absurd.  They have used Islam in every speech they made.  Mubarak of Egypt and Gaddafi of Libya are similarly said to have had secular dictatorships (Mubarak's being a "semi-dictatorship").  But all of them used the cues from Islamism.  The only thing is that they used the threat of even more extreme Islamists (like the Muslim Brotherhood) to make other countries support them over the alternative.  There is a huge gulf between Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Bashar al Assad.

Anyway, I basically think that at this point, dictators are on shaky ground.  But give the Islamists enough time, and they will be hated...or else all of these democracies will no longer be democracies and will be failed states like Afghanistan.
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