I’m not an expert on the subject, but for example Iraq under Saddam or Syria under Assad have arguably the worst human rights. Libya was pretty bad too, about as bad.
But then you have some countries that are bad, but not as terrible. Qatar, Jordan, Turkey, etc. None is worth writing home about, but they are better than Saddam’s Iraq or Assad’s Syria.
Israel is the only democracy and I’m guessing has the best human rights record. However they sound like an aberration. I’d assume due to higher human capital and a lot of immigration from nations with traditions of democracy and human rights (that might be bullshit, most Israeli immigrants came from the USSR).
So I’m wondering, why does Kuwait have better human rights than Saddam’s Iraq? Is it because there is less ethnic and religious strife in Kuwait vs places like Iraq or Syria? Both Iraq and Syria had a country where the religious minority ruled the nation (Iraq is Shia majority and Saddam’s ruling class was Sunni. Syria is Sunni majority while the ruling class is Shia).
Plus places like Iraq and Syria have issues with the Kurds, but then again so does Turkey and their record is better.
Small nations like Qatar or Kuwait have massive oil wealth and small populations, which I assume helps keep the population settled which means less brutality needed.
Or was it just bad luck and someone with a better human rights record than Saddam could’ve held Iraq together just as well?
So why does it vary so much? Natural resources? Religious strife? Ethnic strife? Minority ruled governments?
My first thought would be how strictly they adhere to sharia law. Not exclusively, of course, but I would think it’d be a major factor considering its draconian treatment of women and transgressors.
Modern Tunisia is a free democracy. Freedom House ranks them a 1 (low numbers are good, 7 is max) in freedom of the press, and a 3 in civil liberties, for an overall assessment of “free.” The only other free country in the region is Israel and they get a 1 and a 2 for their scores.
The next best countries are Lebanon and Morocco both with a 5/4 score (“Partly Free”), and Jordan and Kuwait, 5/5. All the other ones are marked “Not Free,” although Libya was Partly in 2013 and 2014.
Turkey is 4/5 and Partly, although placed in the Europe category. For the record, the worst are KSA and Syria, which was bad in years past and got worse due to the law. Iran is “only” 6/6.
The term “Sharia law” is kind of a right wing canard. There are very strict, oppressive interpretations of it, sure. But in somewhere like Lebanon, all Islamic law means are the laws related to things like when Muslims marry and divorce, but don’t apply to Christians or other religions.
I am sure Palestinians would be surprised to learn if “Israeli human rights”. And Freedom House is funded by the USG so it’s only use is finding out which country the US does not look like at the present time.
Lebanon is a lot more cosmopolitan than most ME nations as far as religion is concerned. 40% of the population is Christian, and just over half are Muslim. It’s definitely an anomaly.
Fair enough, but then you’d think their assessment of Iran would be worse. If you prefer, the UK’s Democracy Index (Israel and Tunisia “flawed democracies,” Lebanon, Morocco, Turkey, and Iraq “hybrid regimes,” Kuwait and Jordan and most of the rest “authoritarian.” Or Austria’s Democracy Ranking - they rank Israel below European/North American countries but still pretty high, the next highest ME country I see is Turkey followed by Tunisia, then Kuwait, then Lebanon, then Morocco. Yemen, Syria are down at the bottom (they don’t rank any other countries in that area from what I see).
Though Saddam gave preferential treatment to one sect.
No, they are dominated by the Alaouites, who are only vaguely “shia”
Rather than isolating the region, you shoul
Your first thought it complete nonsense.
There is only the Saudi Arabia which has direct usage of a Sharia.
the law in the region is almost entirely civil code and only in the family law is there real reference back to the religious law.
It is essentially ignorant nonsense since the legal codes are not outside of the family law sharia codes at all.
there is this weird distortion where Americans think the region is all under a religious rule when in fact the majority of the regimes have been and are entirely secular (and of course secular dictatorships, then people ignorantly wonder why secularism is not well regarded…)
No he gave pretential treatment to one lineage, the Tikritis and the people of his region. It was not essentially religious but tribal motivation. He gave preference by blood and by loyalty.
Clannishness & tribal/sectarian conflicts seems to be a major obstacle to western style democracy developing. For example, there are apparently about 150 tribes comprised of ca. 2,000 clans in iraq. There is also a high cousin marriage rate. Consang.net puts the cousin marriage rates for Iraq at anywhere between 25 and 53% in the 1980s and 2000s. Murphy and Kasdan’s “The Structure of Parallel Cousin Marriage” [pg. 24]:
This in turn supports clannishness & nepotism and works against the kind of cooperation/trust of those outside your kin-network that seems to be important for democracies. The Catholic Church in Europe seems to have reduced this trend in Europe by banning cousin marriage and there seems to have been a move away from kinship groups:
I believe at this point most Israelis are of Middle Eastern Jewish (Sephardic / Mizrahi) ethnicity, not Russian, although there are a fair number of Russian Jews as well.
You’re correct that both the Middle Eastern Jews and the Russian Jews tend to be much less liberal on democracy / human rights issues than the initial settlers, which is why the Israeli political spectrum has shifted in a more hardline direction over time.
Ah the wiki Scholarship - with a Map! so impressive.
The map is inaccurate
For example Morocco, the personal family law, the Moudaouana is civil code incorporating in this standard civil code framework the framing of the Islamic law, such as the marriage, but it is not direct sharia law, it is a civil code intepretation - and indeed imposes directly secular law restrictions as that do not exist in the sharia. The same is the case for the majority of the North African countries (the yellow coded). The purple coding on that map is very dubioius and inaccurate, the Yemen it is claiming direct application but it is noting “Law 20/1992 regulates personal status. The constitution mentions sharia” - this is not direct application it is civil code incorporating some of the features. As the article I link to discusses, despite the pious constitutional political hand waving, the actual application is not there, the law codes are effectively code civil with some of the islamic law retouches.
In the same fashion on Iraq, the purple is a ridiculous coding, from the wiki page own discussion
There is one country where “sharia” is the direct law, it is Saudi Arabia.
Shira law by itself is anti human rights. So nations that use Sharia law and lack the infrastruce for communications, or have the government control the flow of information are hot spots for human rights abusers, who are mostly religious nuts or dictators.
The wiki article and the one you link to both make it clear that Islamic law has varying effects in the countries under discussion and it is applied to varying degrees.
I believe that the degree to which religion and ideology is codified into law is a pretty good indicator of how free a country will be. The less religion or ideology in law, the freer the country.
the majority of the ‘codification’ is reference to the family law and if it were not for using the so scary to westerners term “sharia” would not be any more remarkable than the origins of much of the continental European family law practices in the Canon law (or the continued presence of the same).
In all but the Saudi arabia, the legal practice is an influence of the old Islamic law principals on what is in essence the Code Civil, it is civil codification tweaked.
The wiki map and article is full of inaccuracies and very dubious assertions, but the Islamic influence on the civil codification is not fundamentally a different thing than the Christian influence on the European codes in the terms of the values, the norms (things the American christians proudly proclaim of course).
This will be news to the Western Europeans.
Ideology is always in law, it is ridiculous to think otherwise, and the Christian religion frames the sourcing and the traditions -but of course you normalize this away.
No, it is empty of content.
There is nothing particularly Islamic about the secular dictatorships that prevailed in the region since the independence and their censorship laws or practices, in fact largely copied and learned from the Soviets. There is no Islamic explanation for their laws or practices inspired directly from the Soviets.
The Pure secularism.
A bad form of the secularism, but pure.
But of course Americans believe that only the past ten years exist and ignore actual history.