Monarchs and Presidents in Islam

National Review, Nov 21, 1986
by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

IN THE Islamic world’s relations with Israel, the hard-liners are the various Arab and non-Arab republics. When there is any sign of softness, it comes, almost always, from one of the monarchies. (Egypt, and Egypt alone, is the exception.) It thus did not come as a great surprise that King Hassan II of Morocco agreed to meet with the then Israeli prime minister, Shimon Peres, this summer.

While individual monarchs historically may have been capricious or cruel, monarch as an institution is inclined to be generous: Montesquieu has told us that while the driving element in republics is virtue, in monarchies it is clemency. And, indeed, the Islamic monarchs of old were infinitely more tolerant than their modern republican successors. They traveled extensively, and many had a cosmopolitan outlook. Some had relatives abroad. When King Hassan II of morocco writes to members of Europe’s royal families, he addresses them as “cher cousin” or “chere cousine,” since he is a descendant of Mohammed’s daughter Fatima, as by now are all the Christian royal families. (Many centuries ago, a Moroccan prince was taken prisoner by the Castilians and converted in captivity. After his release he married into a princely family, and over the centuries his bloodline has spread into countless aristocratic and royal families.) In chooing their administrators, officers, diplomats, bankers, and doctors, Islam’s monarchs looked for able men regardless of religion, never caring whether their choices were popular or not.

It is true that local slaughters of Christians took place in various parts of the Turkish Empire, but things got really bad only when the enlightened, highly nationalistic Young Turks appeared on the scene. Their political organization was called “Unity and Progress,” by which they meant ethnic uniformity and modern methods. It was they who were behind the big Armenian massacres during World War I. The Turkish sultans, by contrast, frequently gave preferment to Christians (and sometimes Jews) in high positions. The Phanariotic Greeks, so called after the Lighthouse Quarter of Constantinople in which most of them lived, acted as trusted administrators; the governors of the Rumanian-speaking provinces, for instance, were taken from their families.

Very typical is the story of a family known to me. Originally called Black, they were Scots and good Catholics who emigrated after the fall of the Stuarts and settled in France, where they Gallicized their name. There are still Blacques in France, but one branch of the family emigrated to Turkey, where its scions made a splendid career without changing either their name or their religion. One of them, Edward Blacque-Bey, became the last Turkish imperial ambassador in Washington. (His sons, too, made diplomatic careers. One married an American, and his son, having graduated from Harvard, became a colonel in the U.S. Marines and later an American diplomat.) Edward Blacque-Bey wore a fez and was a loyal subject of the sultan, under whom Constantinople became an international metropolis. All this ended with the republic under Ataturk.

Similar conditions existed in the kingdom of Egypt before Nagib and Nasser. Forty per cent of the administrators and civil servants were Coptic Christians, who considered themselves the genuine descendants of the Old Egyptians. Before 1952 Cairo was an eastern Paris, where Christians and Jews played an important role–socially, commercially, politically, Arab nationalism put an end to all this, not only in Cairo, but also in Alexandria, which is so well described in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. In Iran–a non-Arab state–the old monarcy under the Kajar dynasty and the more recent one under the Pahlavis were notably tolerant. Non-Muslims (such as the still-surviving Zoroastrians) could make all sorts of careers, and the country’s political orientation was Western. The window to the West remains open in the Islamic monarchies of today–in Morocco, in Saudi Arabia, in Oman, and even in Malaysia.

MONARCHIES HAVE the advantage that, although they might be oppressive toward the political ambitions of their subjects, they are never totalitarian. To my knowledge there is no Jewish community left in Algeria, but there still is a small one in Morocco. Variety is the keynote of monarchies, and with it goes internationalism. In 1910 only two sovereign nations in Christian Europe had truly native dynasties: Serbia and Montenegor. (Peter III was the last genuine Romanov; the Hohenzollerns were not Prussians but Swabians; and so forth.) These dynasties could often follow unpopular policies, both domestic and foreign. Popular policies are not always good for the country, and the courage required to stick to an unpopular good policy is immensely rare among politicians in democracies. They crave popularity and want, above all, to be re-elected. King Hassan II might be trembling lest he be assassinated by fanatics, but he pursues policies that he considers to be right. He certainly is not guided by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s idiotic dictum, “Self-government is better than good government,” which is roughly equivalent to saying that self-treatment in case of illness is better than treatment by a qualified physician.

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