Sectarian parties are doomed to never shed their spots

The steady expansion of sectarian politics in the Arab world is a real problem that will cause the region untold misery in the future. The problem is that any political party based on race or creed means that it can only appeal to that particular group of people, and cannot appeal to anyone outside. Why should a Lebanese Shiite decide to support a Maronite party? Why should an Iraqi Kurd feel any loyalty to a Sunni Arab political party?

The Arab world needs more issue-led politics, and less sectarian divisions. It needs political parties that can find new ideas about how to manage their countries and then appeal to the whole of a particular nation, using their ideas on what to do as their appeal, not their sect or ethnic identity. Without these political movements, development will be stunted.

People are born into their particular family heritage, and must adopt their parents' heritage. There is nothing anyone can do about that, but it is a disaster to translate this inevitable biological fact into a future political reality. The young woman growing up in today's Egypt will find political problems coming at her that may need answers from outside her particular family and religious background, but she will have to look for answers from the leaders of Egypt's political parties. If they are based on sectarian or ethnic alignments, they limit her political choices.

In the Gulf, religion has become far more political than it was a few decades ago. The Iranian leadership has sought to make common cause with Shiite minorities in several countries, and the Saudi leadership in particular has reacted by emphasising the Sunni Arab nature of Gulf society as defined by the Wahhabi school of Islamic thought. This increased polarisation will lead to some very hard political problems in the future, as once sectarian loyalties are unleashed, they are very hard to bring back into national identities. In Iraq, political parties have wanted to gather easy support by targeting a particular religious or tribal group of people, but by becoming a party of one creed, a party must lose any potential of becoming a truly national or even international force.

While it is true that the complexity of today's Iraqi factions has meant that sectarianism has been limited as coalitions and alliances had to be forged to find and keep power, there is still a huge danger in the background.

Perverted ideals

The danger is that Iraq might go the way of Lebanon, where its democracy has been perverted by the scourge of sectarian politics over decades, including the savage civil war. It is important that the new Arab democracies do not follow this sectarian trend, and instead look to develop more issue-based politics.

Lebanon has always been considered the most established democracy in the Arab world, but even there the sectarian divide is deeply entrenched. The 1926 constitution describes the country as a "parliamentary democratic republic based on respect for public liberties, especially the freedom of opinion and belief". Article 95 seeks the "abolition of political confessionalism according to a transitional plan", which is not happening as the established confessional parties are locked into their power struggle to the great detriment of the country.

When Lebanon gained independence from France in 1943 it built a political system which allocated power to the leading religious communities. The president has always been a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and the Speaker a Shiite.

After the colonial era, Arab history was dominated by two parties which were based on issues and were able to move out of their national and ethnic origins. At the time, the Arab Socialist and Baath parties were able to appeal to the masses across borders, despite how their leaders later perverted their ideals and become arrogant dictators. But there is no such broad Arab force at the moment, other than the Islamist movement, in all its various shades of activism.

One major challenge has been to establish a mass political perception of the separation of politics from religion, which has been described as the development of secular politics.

But confusion between the two concepts of ‘secular' and ‘atheist' has been a serious problem for anyone in the vanguard of starting new secular political ideas. People may be good Muslims but want non-religious political action, and when this secular activity has been defined as atheist, it has put off many possible supporters.

The Arabic for ‘secular' is ilmani, and for ‘atheist' is mulhid, but both these Arabic words have been used to describe atheists. The new political situation means that Arabic needs a new vocabulary, and non-religious politics should not be tarred as atheist, even if some religious parties would like to do so.

The real danger is that any sectarian party cannot mount a broad appeal. And at its core, its purpose has to be defensive politics, rather than seeking the constant social and political change that the world demands.