When ignorance is far from bliss by Simon Kuper in the Financial Times

On the airwaves, everyone is telling us what is happening across the Arab world. The truth (if only anyone would admit it) is that we cannot possibly know. Take the revolution in Cairo, says Joris Luyendijk, a Dutch former foreign correspondent and author of People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East, which examines how difficult it is for journalists to understand the region. Tahrir Square was packed with perhaps 250,000 demonstrators. Thousands of foreign journalists cheered them on. The world was watching. Yet we cannot answer a basic question: was this a popular revolution?

As Luyendijk points out, “One per cent of the Cairo region was on the square. You do get curious about the 19.8 million people who weren’t there.” Perhaps most absentees supported the demonstrators. Alternatively, perhaps most agreed with Egyptian state TV: that the revolution was merely the latest foreign attack on Egypt. However, few western media asked about the absentees. Nobody reported, “And again today, 19.8 million people in Cairo decided not to demonstrate.” We cannot know what the 19.8 million thought, just as we cannot know how many Egyptians support the Muslim Brotherhood, or whether the Brothers are violent fundamentalists. Our ignorance has nothing to do with the old “orientalist” notion that Arabs are unfathomable beings. Rather, we cannot know partly because few of us have spent much time learning about Arab countries, partly because we usually ask only one question about Arabs, and partly because seeing inside these dictatorships is impossible.

Our most basic problem is dumb ignorance. The poorer Arab countries haven’t been “news” for decades. The few foreign correspondents who remained (such as those flown in to cover Tahrir Square) rarely spoke much Arabic and mostly stuck to expat ghettoes. Few western pundits today are equipped to interpret Tunisia or Algeria, says Francis Ghiles, expert on north Africa at the CIDOB think tank in Barcelona. John Chalcraft, historian of Egypt at the London School of Economics, says that if western citizens and media knew more about the Middle East, they could have dismissed certain recent claims made by their governments: for instance, that Saddam Hussein was in league with his enemy al-Qaeda, or that Iraqis would welcome Ahmed Chalabi as president. But western ignorance goes right to the top. George W. Bush pressed for elections in Gaza but was astounded when Hamas won. President Obama’s White House appeared surprised almost daily by the Egyptian revolution. We galumph around the Arab world blindfolded.

Our next problem is the prism through which we see the Arab world. Since 9/11, western governments and media have asked one main question about Arabs: “How can we stop them from blowing us up?” If your question is security, then your answer is likely to be stability. So Egypt’s President Mubarak was understood as our bulwark against crazed Islamists.

Olivier Roy, a great French expert on Islam, writes: “European opinion interprets the popular uprisings through a grille that’s over 30 years old: the Islamic revolution in Iran.” Instead, we might just as well see Arab countries through the prism of another non-Arab country: Turkey, a democracy headed by peaceful Islamists.

The uprisings are nudging us towards seeing Arab countries through a Latin American prism. Luyendijk says: “Mubarak is the new Pinochet.” If you place Mubarak in the long parade of corrupt American-backed militarist thugs, then the key to understanding Egypt ceases to be Islam. Western media have long depicted the Arab world as a chessboard, with Islamic fundamentalists playing in black. But perhaps it’s more like a poorhouse run by mafiosi. Luyendijk wrote five years ago that the story about Arab countries was not so much religion or Israel as dictatorship, corruption and poverty. Now, to general amazement, we’ve had non-religious revolutions against dictatorship, corruption and poverty. It turns out the people in

Tahrir Square

were asking different questions from us.

But Luyendijk thinks our ignorance is even more profound. He says we cannot know what is happening inside dictatorships. Arab countries are short on free elections, free media and opinion polls. Hardly anyone living in these places could speak freely. Academics in Arab countries serve at the pleasure of the secret police, which is one reason I’ve only quoted western pundits here. As Ghiles describes fear in Tunisia: “Parents would send their children to bed before daring to utter home truths.”

Consequently, we can only guess at Arab public opinion. When Dick Cheney said Iraqis would welcome American troops with flowers, there was no way of knowing. In this climate it’s hard even for Arabs to know what their own countrymen think. Egypt’s revolution didn’t only surprise Obama. It surprised the Muslim Brotherhood too.

Journalists get paid for saying what they know, not what they don’t know, and so they are now telling us what Egyptians want. Perhaps it’s time to admit: we don’t know. When I asked Ghiles for predictions about voting in Egypt and Tunisia, he said: “At this stage it’s completely pointless.”

But thanks to these revolutions, we might now actually find out something about Arab countries. Democracy is an information system.