January 31, 2012
Flights of fancy
Dear Harold,
We find it ironic that the author of the column below that recently appeared in the Washington Post is also the author of “Holy Ignorance.”
How else to explain how someone can be so blind to what is happening in countries like Egypt? Has he not read the polls taken in Egypt over the past few years, showing strong support for sharia law?
Does he really believe that the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist political parties, which won over 2/3 of the seats in Egypt’s parliamentary elections, were elected simply because they promised a better economy?
Does he really believe the Muslim Brotherhood would support the right of Muslims to convert to Christianity?
There are those who see what they want to see, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Many of them are in our government, in the media, in academia. We, too, would be delighted to see a reformed Muslim Brotherhood, one that, according to the author below, is “middle class bourgeois.” One that has given up its aspirations for worldwide Islamist rule.
But we can’t afford to engage in such flights of fancy.
A new generation of political Islamists steps forward
By Olivier Roy, Published: January 20
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Tuesday, 31 January 2012
Olivier Roy is a professor at the European University Institute in Florence and the author of “Holy Ignorance.”
Everywhere, the Muslim Brotherhood is benefiting from a democratization it did not trigger. There is a political vacuum
because the liberal vanguard that initiated the Arab Spring did not try, and did not want, to take power. This was
a revolution without revolutionaries. Yet the Muslim Brothers are the only organized political force. They are rooted in
society, and decades of opposition against authoritarian regimes gave them experience, legitimacy and respect. Their
conservative agenda fits a conservative society, which may welcome democracy but did not turn liberal.
Under these circumstances, the ghost of a totalitarian Islamic state is raised, with the specter of imposing sharia and
closing the short democratic parenthesis. But such an outcome is unlikely.
The Islamists have, in fact, changed: They are more middle-class “bourgeois,” and they benefited from the liberalization
of local economies during the last decades of the 20th century, especially in countries with no oil rent. The Islamists
have also drawn lessons from the failure of ideological regimes and from the success of Turkey’s AKP party. They
are no longer advocating jihad and understand geostrategic constraints, such as the need to maintain peace, even a cold
one, with Israel. Realism is the starting point of political wisdom.
The Islamists have been elected with a clear agenda: stability, good governance and a better economy. If they have
been able to reach a larger constituency than the hard-core supporters of sharia, it is precisely because they can combine
such a reformist agenda while talking about religion, values, identity and tradition. The Nahda party won the majority of
the votes cast at the Tunisian consulate of San Francisco, although Tunisian expatriates in Silicon Valley are not known
for their Islamic fundamentalism.
This mix of technocratic modernism and conservative values is their brand, and to turn their back on multipartism and
legalism would alienate a large portion of their constituency, at a time when they have no means to confiscate power.
They have neither military forces nor oil wealth to bypass the people: They have to negotiate and deliver. Their electorate
wants stability and peace, not revolution.
They are stepping into a new political landscape: a democracy, although a fledgling and fragile one. The only way to
maintain their legitimacy is through elections. Even if their pristine political culture is not democratic, they are formatted
by the democratic landscape, much as the Roman Catholic Church ended up accepting democratic institutions. But it will
take time.
Another important change, if we refer to the “revolutionary” period of the 1970s and 1980s, is that the Muslim Brothers
do not monopolize Islam in the public sphere. In fact, the religious revival that has engulfed Arab societies led to a
diversification and an individualization of the religious field. Religious state institutions such as Al Azhar, so recently
discredited, are regaining autonomy after so recently being discredited. Al Azhar’s dean, Sheikh Ahmed Al-Tayyeb, openly
spoke in favor of democracy and of separating religious institutions from the state. A new phenomenon is the decision
of the Salafis, an ultraconservative Sunni sect, to establish political parties. On the one hand they will push for a more
Islamic agenda, trying to outbid the Muslim Brothers on Islam, but this will force the Brotherhood to clarify its own
position and to find a way to distance itself from the call for sharia.
To do that, the Muslim Brothers have to turn purely Islamic norms into more universal conservative values — such as
limiting the sale and consumption of alcohol in a way that is closer to Utah’s rules than to Saudi laws and promoting
“family values” instead of imposing sharia norms on women.
In the coming months the hot issue in Egypt, beyond the status of women, will be religious freedom. Not in the sense
that Coptic Christians will have less freedom to practice — there were a lot of limitations under the so-called secular
dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak — but in defining religious freedom as not merely a minority right but an individual
human right, implying the right to convert from Islam to Christianity.
The issue is institutionalizing democracy, not promoting liberal policies. Democracy could take hold only if it is based
in well-established values. Liberalism does not precede democracy; America’s Founding Fathers were not liberal.
But once democracy is rooted in institutions and political culture, then the debate on freedom, censorship, social
norms and individual rights could be managed through freedom of expression and changes of majorities in parliament.
However, there will be no institutionalization of democracy without the Muslim Brothers.
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