Last September the foreign ministers of Iran and Egypt talked to each other during the U.N. General Assembly, and agreed to expand economic ties and other relations. During the height of Egypt's campaign against Iran and Sudan, two Egyptian journalists I encountered declared that the Egyptian government was merely attempting to divert attention from domestic problems to outside the country. It is true that these ideas were mainly developed in the West. Each culture has developed its own forms of these ideas within its individual historical context. In this sense, to argue that the Islamic and Arab worlds will never develop the ideas of human rights, democracy, or the rule of law, is absolutism of the worst kind.
Historical viewpoint is virtually absent in such an argument.
Most of those regions have been victims of colonialism and imperialism since the nineteenth century, and have long been subjected to the rules of Europeans. Struggles for securing rights were, therefore, necessarily aimed at outside rulers. Further, as numerous wars in the region have made clear, the borders established at the time of independence were highly arbitrary. The foreign-drawn borders totally ignored important ethnic and religious factors. Under such circumstances, Arab and Islamic countries had to give their priorities to the maintenance of domestic unity.