Things are looking up for North Africa. With the capture and near-immediate death of Libya’s former dictator, Muammar Ghaddafi, Libya is now free to remake its political and governmental infrastructure in the image of more liberal and successful countries. Tunisia held its first democratic election on Oct. 23 during which more than one party ran without guns to their heads and the “winning” party didn’t get a staggering 99.9 percent of the vote. Having sent their former dictator scurrying into the waiting arms of Saudi Arabia’s Al Saud family with only the clothes on their backs and millions of dollars in gold bars, Tunisia seems poised on the brink of governmental and political reform.
The two countries also fall into the same trap Afghanistan fell into when its government was uprooted during the early 1990s. When a country is unstable, there are factions that have an unauthorized opportunity to step in and stabilize the situation with promises of reform and order. In Libya’s case, there were already Muslim extremist groups stepping forward and public calls for the reinstatement of strict Islamic Sharia law and polygamy.
An idealized polygamous relationship allows for multiple wives to share the work and upkeep of a large household and family, allowing their husband to focus on increasing the family wealth and being the spiritual leader of the family. But in reality it often degenerates into a patriarchal dictatorship with a grown man playing “Wife Pokémon” with a subdued “Gotta Catch ‘em All” attitude and women relegated to the status of livestock and being sold, traded or given away with the full permission of Sharia law.
Several Western news reports even paint Libyan women as excited and eager for Sharia and to get married via polygamy system but Al Jazeera describes the Libyan female sentiment to be overwhelmingly negative to these ideas.
In Tunisia the Islamic Ennahda Party swept the polls during the election. Although considered moderates among Muslims, most of the world has a knee-jerk reaction to any group that identifies itself first and foremost by its fundamental roots in Islam and for good reason and one word: Taliban. The group has promised not to revoke the rights and freedoms set down in the Tunisian constitution from 1959, rights such as women being allowed to wear what they want, drive and work and own things like businesses, their children and their own bodies. But they are a reform party that is based on Islam, how will they mesh their ideas into the liberal francophone sort of lifestyle of Tunisia that includes bikinis, beer and beach parties?
The key to understanding how a country could want to trade one dictator for an even more restrictive council of Sharia law lies within the class struggle. While the elite and middle class of both Libya and Tunisia embraced Western culture and liberal lifestyles, it was the poor that felt oppression most strongly during both regimes. They came to associate Western ideals and progressive structures as markers of the deceit, immorality and corruption that their previous dictator was rife with. When the Tunisian election came, the poor made their voices heard by voting for a party that held the same beliefs as they themselves held and approached politics with a modest attitude and promises of reform and order.
Tunisians wanted a bit of structure and sanity after chaos and no doubt Libyans do too. However, it’s not a situation for the West to get involved in. As much as we want to warn Tunisia and Libya of the dangers of letting wolves into their pasture to shepherd the flocks, interference would do more harm than good and cause both great resentment and a resurgence of anti-Western sentiment. The stronger the West objects, the more strongly Sharia-ruled countries will believe they are on the right path. It is up to the Tunisian and Libyan citizens to decide what the next logical step towards healing the scars of decades of oppression should be.