Democratic thoughts dance through the Arab land - Gulf News: Opinion, Youssef M. Ibrahim

Poke around conversations in the cafés up and down Dubai’s creek, the gold souks of downtown Jeddah, or in the privacy of a million homes across the vast Arab landscape and you might hear good things being said about the US President George W. Bush.

Intellectuals, businessmen and working class people alike can be caught these days lauding Bush’s hard-edged posture on democracy in Arab lands, cheering his irreverent handling of Middle Eastern rulers who are US allies as he puts pressure on them to hold free elections, release political prisoners and open trade.

Hidden yearnings of the heart, now spoken

From Casablanca to Kuwait City, what Bush says mirrors, reinforces and, in fact, reflects what has long been in the heart: A yearning for human rights, justice, freedom, rule of law, transparency, limits on power and women’s rights. In short, civilisation as we know it today in the 21st century.

People, men and women, are less worried about getting hurt or arrested than about conveying what is on their minds.

It takes a big man to say: maybe I got it wrong

Regardless of Bush’s intentions - which many Arabs and Muslims still view with suspicion - the US president and his neoconservative crowd are helping to spawn a spirit of reform and a new vigour to confront dynastic dictatorships and other assorted ills in the Greater Middle East.

It is enough for someone like me and most of my liberal friends, who have long felt that Bush’s attitude toward the Middle East was all wrong, to wonder whether his idea of setting the Arab and Muslim house in order first may not in fact be the right approach to wider justice in the region.

Coordination and contagion

“The answer is within us, not anywhere else,’’ said a nameless young man, one of the thousands who waved Lebanese flags in Beirut’s Martyrs Square the other day to a television interviewer.

In other words, the groundswell itself is the only guarantee of its survival, with more Arabs than ever baring their souls, showing no fear.

The magical power of words: Kifaya

By now all the world knows the slogan for this nascent peoples’ Arab revolt is kifaya (enough) a word which will enter dictionaries, just as the Palestinian intifida did.

It is both emphatic and vague enough to be all encompassing yet effective: enough of autocrats, enough corruption, enough occupation and enough repression. It has acquired magical and perhaps lasting power.

Too soon to declare victory: a word to the wise

So one is left to wonder if this moment will last more than a moment, whether it will turn into a repeat of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall or whether it will be a reprise of the truncated Beijing Spring.

For now, all the Middle East has are demonstrators and brave voters who, ballot by imperfect ballot, e-mail by e-mail are burying a culture of fear. And for the moment, that may be enough.

Meanwhile, for the voice of cynicism and hopelessness, same paper, same day, same page, take a look at what Linda S. Heard has to say.