Democracy

By Naguib mahfouz

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The increasingly persistent foreign demand that Arab countries should apply and uphold democracy must not blind us to the indisputable fact that democracy was always one of the essential precepts of the nationalist movement in Egypt.

It was never, in other words, an American innovation. The move towards democracy in fact dates back to the time when Khedive Ismail established the first Egyptian parliament. This does not of course imply that democracy was fully applied then or even subsequently. My point, however, is that democracy is an Egyptian demand that goes back to the 19th century. The worst thing we can do is to measure democracy by what is currently going on in Iraq. This is to give up faith in it.

What we should do, rather, is give up faith in the agency that now calls for it. For when we called for democracy during the 1919 Revolution we could never have imagined such tragedies as take place in the name of democracy. Based on an interview by Mohamed Salmawy