The future of minority communities is delicately poised as the hope of the Arab spring segues into an Arab summer in which crackdowns prevail. Even as the central plot running across the Middle East is one of revolutionary fervor versus staying power of long-entrenched despots, a critical sub-story is the dilemma of how minorities can be accommodated in the push for transformation and in the nascent new order.
One of the presumptive myths of former and present Arab dictatorships in multi-ethnic or multi-religious societies like Egypt, Syria and Bahrain is that tyrants with secular and liberal mores are necessary, not only to keep Islamist terrorists under check but to protect minority groups that could be pulverized by the majority if democracy dawns. Democracy is crudely caricatured by Arab authoritarian rulers as nothing but majority rule in which vulnerable minorities would have no security.
Minority cloud looms over Arab summer
As the Arab spring moves towards summer, the future of minority groups hang in the balance. While authoritarians claimed to protect the minorities, would majority-rule governments do justice to these groups?