Middle ground for the Middle East

A Skype video chat, a live connection with students in Afghanistan and five weeks of hard work and meetings lead to Warwick University’s first ever internationally televised web conference debate.

Under an initiative of the Warwick International Development Society (WIDS), undergraduates from the Politics and International Studies (PAIS) department at Warwick and students from Karwan University, Kabul were brought together to engage in a two-hour debate on ‘Policy Development in the Middle East’ via Skype.

“It is great to hear a completely different culture engaging in debate, because all you really hear is Westerners debating amongst Westerners about situations on the other side of the world,” said James Norris, a third-year PAIS student panellist and the International Representative from Warwick Pride.

Initial speeches covered a broad range of topics, such as international security in the Middle East, the potential for military strikes against nuclear facilities in Iran, and US Foreign Policy and its effect on the Arab Spring revolution. Discussion eventually turned to Afghanistan and the compatibility of Islam with democracy: “It was really almost validating to hear Afghans talk about that lack of knowledge of democracy, about lack of identifying with democratic values,” concluded Norris after the second round.

Team Karwan, led by Nasir Naimee, covered three major arguments regarding problems in implementing democracy in Afghanistan and the Middle East, including religious factors and the closed culture and regional interference in the Middle East. Naimee believes that implementing Western democracy in the Middle East would be a big challenge; he emphasised that democratic principles followed by the West, and especially the United States, cannot be implemented in Arab countries, as many of these rules and regulations tend to be against the laws of Islam.
In an attempt to advance his argument, he maintained that attempts to implement US-style democracy have failed in the last ten years because the Middle Eastern countries are not yet at a stage to accept this kind of a government. The students at Karwan University concluded that democracy should be incorporated in accordance with the cultural traditions and religion of the country.

At this stage the debate evolved into a more favourable discussion about Islam and its compatibility with democracy; much like the topic of the debate, there was a lot of compatibility between the two teams – Karwan and Warwick found a common ground.
Jack Gould, one of Warwick’s four panellists, agreed that, “Yes, democracy is possible in the Middle Eastern countries; but it’s not Western democracy, but a new form of democracy based on tolerance, and can’t be imposed; it has to be indigenous.” Members of the panel at Warwick noted that the problem in the Middle East is that democracy has become synonymous with imposing Western values, rather than it being from within.

In the follow-up of the debate, the final two panellists of Karwan University, Ahmad Ramiz Bakhtiar and Ahmad Rashed Ahmadi, spoke of women’s rights and education. Western Society and those who want to implement democracy very rarely understand concepts of the Middle East; most people in Afghanistan at present don’t have a concept of education and are not willing to enrol their children in schools or higher education. Furthermore, co-education is not permissible in Afghani culture, and neither is allowing men and women to work together.

Another way in which the two cultures differ is in attitudes to freedom in sexual activity: seen as the right of a human being in Western Society it accommodates ‘freedom of choice’, but it tends to oppose the rules and laws of Middle Eastern countries.
However, being an Islamic republic, Kanwar strongly opposes those who deny women their rights. Speaking on women’s rights, Helen Moyle, a third-year PAIS student and Warwick panellist, proposed that “if you don’t have a democracy, people who are poorer or are female or in some way socially undesirable are held down by society; if they don’t have an option to have a voice, then nothing’s ever going to be done about it.”

Moyle also spoke about Afghanistan’s future after 2014. Other topics of the debate included media depiction of the Middle East, and anti-Americanism in Islam, followed by concluding comments by all panellists.

“For me it was creating a platform for students from completely different environments, and completely different cultural settings, to discuss anything they wanted,” said Aleksandra Katolik, President of WIDS.

“I think it was a fantastic experience, it was a great scheme,” added Joseph Haigh, a third-year PAIS student, and the fourth panellist from Warwick. “I think the lesson from this is that we agree on more than we disagree.”

This event was conducted in collaboration with SIBE TV and broadcast across the globe by SIBE.co.uk and Blogtv. Two similar debates will be held in term three. A recorded version of this debate can now be viewed on YouTube.