Legitimate interests

Omayma Abdel-Latif assesses the implications of the new wave of political Islam sweeping the region

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Hours after the stunning victory of the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, in the Palestinian elections and the Western media machine was preparing to launch an avalanche of warnings. Some of the commentary bordered on paranoia as writer after writer questioned whether or not Hamas's ascendancy heralded the dawn of a new age of Islamist politics in the Middle East and what this might mean for the West's interests in the region.

The concerns voiced were hardly new: they reflect a dilemma Western policy-makers have found themselves in for some time now as they struggle to come to terms with Muslim democrats whose presence and integration into the much hyped process of democratisation can no longer be ignored.

Hamas's landslide victory is the latest in a series of electoral successes scored by Islamist groups across the Arab world. In Lebanon three members of Hizbullah, a resistance movement that, like Hamas, is considered a terrorist organisation by the West, now sit around the cabinet table. In Iraq the religious United Iraqi Alliance is the key partner in government following its strong performance in the 15 December parliamentary elections. In Egypt the officially outlawed Muslim Brotherhood holds 88 seats in the People's Assembly, making it the largest opposition bloc. In Kuwait, Yemen and Bahrain Islamist groups constitute the main opposition force. In Morocco the Justice and Development Party, modelled on the Turkish ruling party, holds 40 seats and is the main opposition bloc, while in Jordan the Muslim Brothers have 17 seats in parliament.

But the significance of Hamas's win lies in the fact that it is the first time an Islamist movement has come to power in an Arab country through the ballot box. So will the West, which has long claimed that democracy is a panacea for all the region's woes, accept the outcome of a process it supposedly backs?

While Hamas's victory may have stunned the world, some Islamists, at least, had seen the writing on the wall. "Had free and fair elections been held in this region a decade ago the majority of governments would have been formed by Islamist parties," Saadeddin Al-Osmani, secretary-general of the Justice and Development Party, told Al-Ahram Weekly on Monday.

One of the many questions raised in the wake of the Hamas triumph is why so many in Arab countries, when they have a chance to exercise the hard- won right to vote, opt for Islamists. Essam El-Erian, a senior member of the MB's politburo, believes the Islamists' appeal's mainly to do with growing frustration with the status quo.

"The current regimes," he says, "have reached such levels of corruption, cronyism and dependency on the West that they have completely alienated the people. When they have fair elections, the people make their opinions clear."

Al-Osmani, like El-Erian, acknowledges that the Islamists do attract a number of protest votes. Yet in the case of the Justice and Development Party, Al-Osmani says, there are three categories of voters; the party's core constituency, the protest voters and others, including left-leaning voters. "Voters who don't even observe religious obligations have said they voted for us because we are not corrupt and have credibility," he says.

The Islamists also benefit from the weakness of liberal and secular forces, a point underlined by Egypt's prime minister who, in an interview published in the current Newsweek magazine, says the Brothers' victory in Egypt was due to "the weakness of secular forces".

"People have no confidence in the old elites, particularly those from the liberal and secular wings," believes Al-Osmani. "They have had a chance but failed to deliver and now people want to give the Islamists a chance."

But how prepared is the West to have Islamists running the Arab polity? And how prepared are Islamists to take over?

The subject was discussed during a two-day meeting held in Rome last November between Islamist activists and a group of intellectuals from the US and Europe. Issues ranging from defining a moderate Islamist to the role of Sharia (Islamic law) and the status of women and minority groups all triggered heated discussions that revealed a sense of mutual mistrust.

Many Islamist participants made no secret of their frustration with the way their Western counterparts passed judgement on perceived intentions rather than deeds. Western participants said Islamists had to prove that they are ready to win and lose elections and clear the ambiguity surrounding their stand on many of the issues the West considers vital.

"There is a strong realisation that you cannot ignore the Islamist movements any more when you are talking about democracy in the Middle East," Marina Ottaway, of the Carnegie Foundation, told the meeting. "But there are also strong concerns that once in power it will be one man, one vote, one time."

While many Islamists acknowledge some of the West's concerns as legitimate, and capable of being settled through dialogue, other fears, they say, are exaggerated, and deliberately ignore the diversity within Islamist movements. Islamists also believe that Westerners tend to interpret political Islam from a culturally specific and essentialist perspective, rather than dealing with the phenomenon as a socio-political one.

"Just as left and right have extreme factions and moderate ones, the same goes for the Islamist movement, which includes Bin Ladin and Al-Zawahri as well as people like us," says Al-Osmani.

In a policy paper entitled The Key to Arab Reform: Moderate Islamists, Amr Hamzawy, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argued for the integration of Islamists in the reform process. "Democracy cannot come to Arab societies without the participation of movements that command huge popular support," he wrote, adding that rather than resisting Islamists, Western governments should develop policies to positively engage the moderates among them.

But the Islamists too, are aware they have to tread carefully and must temper their radical streak with pragmatism. Al-Osmani says that Islamists who move from opposition to government office should show sufficient flexibility to cope with their new roles. "The literature of the Islamist movement is not some holy text. It must bend to cope with the changes," he says, citing the example of his own party which had to omit the word Sharia from its platform so as to avoid any misunderstanding over its gradualist approach.

Several Islamists offered comforting words, designed to allay the West's fears over their entry into politics. When confronted with a barrage of questions on the West's concerns over the ramifications of Islamists taking power, Sheikh Ali Salman, a Shia cleric from Bahrain and head of the Al-Wefaq National Islamic Society, said: "we are not against the legitimate interests of the West but we also have our own interests to preserve when dealing with the West. Rather than selectively encouraging democracy only where it serves the West's agenda, we can reach a formula whereby both the interests of our people and those of the West are secured."