In Arabic, 'Internet' Means 'Freedom'
By Jonathan Rauch
Odd
though it may sound, somewhere in Baghdad a man is working in secrecy to edit
new Arabic versions of Liberalism, by the Austrian economist Ludwig von
Mises, and In Defense of Global Capitalism, by the Swedish economist Johan
Norberg. He is doing this at some risk of kidnap, beating, and death,
because he hopes that a new Arabic-language Web site, called LampofLiberty.org
-- MisbahAlHurriyya.org in Arabic -- can change the world by publishing liberal
classics.
Odder
still, he may be right.
Interviewed
by e-mail, he asks to be known by a pseudonym, H. Ali Kamil. A Shiite
from Iraq's south, he is an accomplished scholar, but he asks that no other
personal details be revealed. Two of his friends have been killed in the
postwar insurgency and chaos, one shot and the other "slaughtered."
Others of his acquaintance are in hiding, visiting their families in secret. He
has been threatened for working with an international agency.
Now
he is collaborating not with foreign agencies but with foreign ideas. He has
made Arabic translations of all or parts of more than two dozen articles and
nine books and booklets. "None," he says, "were previously
translated, to my knowledge, for the simple reason that they are all on
liberalism and democracy, which unfortunately have little audience and
advocators in the Middle East, where almost all publishing houses and press
outlets are governmental -- i.e., anti-liberal."
Kamil's
work is anonymous out of fear, not modesty. Translating Frederic Bastiat's The
Law, he says, took 20 days of intense labor. "I am proud of that,
especially when I knew that the book has never been translated before. This is
one of the works my heart is aching for not having my name in its front
page."
Asked
how he began this work, he recounts meeting an American who was lecturing in
Baghdad on principles of constitutional government. The message struck home.
"Yes, you could say I am libertarian," Kamil says. "I believe in
liberty for all, equality and human rights, freedom and democracy, free-market
ethics, and I hate extremism in everything. I believe in life more than death
as being the way to happiness."
The
American was Tom G. Palmer, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in
Washington and a man who cares a lot about books. (So much so, that he always
walks around with a satchel full of them.) When the Soviet Union fell, he
worked on making key liberal texts available in Russian and the languages of
the former Soviet Bloc. How can democracy and markets thrive, after all,
without the owner's manual?
In
2004, Palmer traveled to Iraq for an education-ministry conference on reforming
the schools. Having expunged compulsory Baathist education, the Iraqis were
figuring out what came next. "They desperately wanted something different
from what they had," Palmer says. Like many Albanians and Romanians he met
after the Soviet Union collapsed, Iraqis pulled him aside to tell stories of
family members harassed or killed by the fallen regime. The strikingly
ubiquitous statues and images of Saddam Hussein testified to how thoroughly the
Baathist dictatorship had dominated intellectual life.
Intellectual
isolation is a widespread Arab phenomenon, not just an Iraqi one. Some of the
statistics are startling. According to the United Nations' 2003 "Arab
Human Development Report," five times more books are translated annually
into Greek, a language spoken by just 11 million people, than into Arabic.
"No more than 10,000 books were translated into Arabic over the entire
past millennium," says the U.N., "equivalent to the number translated
into Spanish each year." Authors and publishers must cope with the whims
of 22 Arab censors. "As a result," writes a contributor to the
report, "books do not move easily through their natural markets."
Newspapers are a fifth as common as in the non-Arab developed world; computers,
a fourth as common. "Most media institutions in Arab countries remain state-owned,"
the report says.
No
wonder the Arab world and Western-style modernity have collided with a shock.
They are virtually strangers, 300 years after the Enlightenment and 200 years
after the Industrial Revolution. Much as other regions may be cursed with
disease or scarcity, in recent decades the Arab world has been singularly
cursed with bad ideas. First came Marxism and its offshoots; then the fascistic
nationalism of Nasserism and Baathism; now, radical Islamism. Diverse as those
ideologies are, they have in common authoritarianism and the suppression of any
true private sphere. Instead of withering as they have done in open competition
with liberalism, they flourished in the Arab world's relative isolation.
Palmer's
first thought was to launch a think tank in Iraq, but that fizzled when the
institute's prospective president bailed out at his wife's urging, for fear of
his life. Last April, Palmer returned to Iraq to give talks on constitutional
and free-market principles. At one such talk he met Kamil. Returning to
Washington, Palmer connected with other liberal Arabs and, with their help,
began commissioning translations: of Bastiat, Mises, Adam Smith, John Stuart
Mill, Voltaire, David Hume, F.A. Hayek, and such influential contemporary
writers as Mario Vargas Llosa and Hernando de Soto. Most of this
stuff has either been unavailable in Arabic or available spottily,
intermittently, and in poor translations.
In
January, MisbahAlHurriyya.org made its Internet debut. Today it hosts about 40
texts; Palmer aims for more like 400, including a shelf of books. (It currently
offers an abridged edition of Hayek's Road to Serfdom and Bastiat's The Law.
The Norberg book is coming soon.) Sponsored by the Cato Institute, it joins a
small but growing assortment of Arabic-language blogs and Web sites
promulgating liberal ideas.
"The
Internet is a historical opportunity for Arab liberalism," Pierre Akel,
the Lebanese host of one such site, metransparent.com, said in a recent interview with Reason magazine. "In the Arab
world, much more than in the West, we can genuinely talk of a blog
revolution." The Internet provides Arab liberals with the platform and
anonymity that they need; helpfully, Arabic-language blogware, developed by
liberal bloggers, recently came online for free downloading. During the recent
controversy over a Danish newspaper's publication of cartoons depicting the
Prophet Mohammed, an Egyptian blog, EgyptianSandMonkey.blogspot.com, made a
splash by pointing out that no one had protested when the same cartoons had
previously been published on the front page of an Egyptian newspaper -- and by
calling, sardonically, for a Muslim boycott of Egypt. (The site boasts a "Buy
Danish" sticker.)
Since
the 1950s, the U.S. State Department (and the former U.S. Information Agency,
now folded into State) has steadily commissioned and published Arabic
translations of American books, including a sprinkling of political classics, such
as The Federalist Papers. Its translation programs are run by the embassies in
Cairo and Jordan. According to Alberto Fernandez, of the State
Department's Near Eastern Affairs Bureau, a third program, managed from
Washington and still fledgling, seeks to bring translated books to Iraq.
Those
print editions, worthy though they are, are subject to the vagaries of
commercial book distribution, which is decidedly spotty in the region. The U.N.
report notes that in the Arab world -- a region of 284 million -- a book that
sells 5,000 copies qualifies as a best-seller.
The
Internet, in contrast, makes possible worldwide, instant distribution, at a
nearly negligible cost. MisbahAlHurriyya.org relies heavily on volunteers and
donated Web services; its budget, says Palmer, is in the five figures. Thanks
to e-mail, conferring and passing manuscripts between Washington, Baghdad, and
Amman -- a logistical nightmare in the days of mail and fax -- is a cinch. The
site, entirely in Arabic, advertises on the popular Arabic Web sites
Albawaba.com and Aljazeera.net. The whole enterprise was impossible a decade
ago.
Firmly
establishing liberal ideas took centuries in the West, and may yet take decades
in the Arab world. Authoritarian and sectarian and tribalist notions are easier
to explain than liberal ones, and it is inherently harder to build trust in
mercurial markets and flowing democratic coalitions than in charismatic
leaders, visionary clerics, and esteemed elders. The liberal world's
intellectual underpinnings are as difficult to grasp as its cultural reach is
difficult to escape. Thus the disjunction within which Baathism, Islamism, and
Arab tribalism have festered.
Yet
few who are genuinely intellectually curious can read J.S. Mill or Adam Smith
and come away entirely unchanged. The suffocating Arab duopoly of
state-controlled media and Islamist pulpits is cracking -- only a little bit so
far, but keep watching. In the Arab world, the Enlightenment is going online.
-- Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer for National Journal magazine,
where "Social Studies" appears. His e-mail address is
jrauch@nationaljournal.com.
© National Journal Group Inc.