Islamism at the ballot box
With the impressive electoral gains made by moderate Islamists in several Middle East countries, Rasha Saad explores the implications of their victory
The Turkish Justice and Development Party's (JDP) sweeping victory in parliamentary elections was only the latest in a series of wins by moderate Islamist parties in the region. Coming just a few years after these parties began fielding candidates under their party banners, their electoral successes mark a sort of a political coming-of-age.
In secular Turkey, the JDP captured one third of the vote and secured a two-thirds majority in parliament. Islamists were the major gainers in the Moroccan elections in September, increasing their presence in the Chamber of Representatives from 14 to 42 seats. Bahraini Islamists won most of the 40 seats up for grabs in October's legislative elections -- the country's first in nearly 30 years.
In the 1990s it became clear that there is no one form for political Islam. While some Islamist organisations engaged in terrorism, seeking to topple governments, others spread their message through social and charity work or participating in party politics.
The timing of the victories, too, is significant, coming as they did while Western countries -- the US in particular -- are increasingly equating Islam with violence and repression.
Most of the recently successful Islamist candidates and parties seem to have broadened their appeal by smoothing out the rough edges of their ideologies. They shifted their focus from slogans emphasising their Islamic character to identifying and addressing problems in their societies.
In Bahrain, Islamist-oriented parliamentary candidates took job creation, not the creation of an Islamic state, as the main focus of their campaigns. In Turkey, the JDP made clear that in the political sphere it cared less about religion than about improving the economy and steering the nation towards European Union (EU) membership. The Moroccan Justice and Development Party (PJD), for its part, addressed the problem of extensive unemployment which has long plagued the country.
Fahmy Howeidy, a prominent Egyptian columnist and writer on Islamic affairs, while acknowledging the progressive shift in Islamists' discourse to include social problems, suggests that the transition was bound to occur where it did because of the increased margin of freedom that these states were willing to tolerate.
"Islamist discourse was able to develop in these countries when their governments offered more democracy. Democracy secures a healthy political life that makes Islamists more mature, more experienced and able to identify with the problems of their society."
Howeidy attributes the extent of democratisation, at least in part, "to a general increase in calls for transparency [in Arab and Islamic countries] and to increased concern about human rights issues."
In countries like Morocco and Bahrain, Howeidy says, the emergence of new leaderships contributed to such developments. "They [Morocco's King Mohamed VI and Bahrain's king [Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa] sought to develop their image by developing their practice of democracy so as to appeal to their people and bolster their legitimacy."
John Esposito, a professor of religion and international affairs at Georgetown University, has written about this shift. "Secular nationalism (whether in the form of liberal nationalism, Arab nationalism, or socialism) has not provided a sense of national identity or produced strong and prosperous societies. The governments in Muslim countries have been unable to establish their political legitimacy. They have been blamed for the failure to achieve economic self-sufficiency... to liberate Palestine, to resist Western political and cultural hegemony."
Islamists who have supported democracy and who participated in elections have repeatedly been accused of using progressive rhetoric in their bid for power, with their detractors predicting that once proponents of such a trend take control they will turn to totalitarianism.
Howeidy, who rejects the label "political Islam" on the basis that is overly provocative, opened fire on these critics. He contends that the charge that Islamists would say one thing to win power, but do another when in office is just as easily applied to any other political party, adding that the accusation "only surfaces when Islamist forces are on the rise". He also argued that in the Arab world, which is in large part governed by secular governments, "democracy is [as weak] as everyone perceives, so we cannot pick only one party and accuse it of being 'an enemy of democracy'."
"The notion that every Islamist is necessarily concealing a hidden agenda and a hidden monster inside him is nonsense," Howeidy said, suggesting that Islamists should be "judged by their declared agenda and by how far this agenda matches the constitution".
"The problem is that there are some intellectuals and politicians who seek to impose their will on the entire society, although they do not have real weight. Suppose that they are against the Islamists while the rest of the society has elected them [the Islamists] in a democratic process. We have to listen to the people's voice."
With the victory of Islamists in more than one country, the Turkish experience, dubbed "the Turkish earthquake", stands out as the most extensive Islamist electoral victory. Moderate Islamists in the Arab world are, consequently, keenly interested in how the JDP will fare. They believe that if it maintains its popularity while in office, it will prove that allowing Islamists to hold power is not antithetical to democracy.
Owen Matthews, who also picked up on the broader relevance of the Turkish situation, wrote in Newsweek that if the JDP's leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, avoids "grinding ideological axes... Turkey could take a big step towards becoming that most elusive entity: the model of a modern democratic stable and economically prosperous Islamic nation. For the rest of the Muslim world what a revolution that would be."
For Abdullah Schleifer, director of the Adham Centre for television journalism at the American University in Cairo, the Turkish experience is already impressive. "Instead of the option of Islamism versus secularism, they called themselves Muslim democrats, not Islamists." That the "democrats" part of label was convincing for many Turks is perhaps supported by the fact that 70 per cent of the people who voted the JDP into power had never voted for a religious party before.
Schleifer believes that the Turkish Islamists have already surpassed their Arab counterparts. "Erdogan is a proven element. He was the mayor of Istanbul for four years; everybody, including secularists, admits that he did a great job. He strove for good government."
The Turkish experience differs from the Arab one, too, Schleifer said, because Islamists there seem to be realists. "They understand the world in which we're living. They understand that we are living in the American empire, so they work politically within this understanding."
Schleifer pointed to the JDP's ability to break out of the "Utopian ideology" that expounds the slogan "Islam is the solution". He characterised the slogan as being a combination of Utopianism and demagoguery "because Islam is not the solution; Islam is our faith and from this faith we can derive the ethics of good government, the importance of a lack of corruption, but [in itself it is] not the solution."
However, with the US war on terrorism, which some perceive as a war on Islam, has the Islamists' victory worried the US?
"If the US is wise, it would welcome this victory because it will stabilise the region. It will be the alternative to a highly political and militant Islam that could end up with another Ayman El-Zawahri and another Bin Laden," Schleifer said.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 28 Nov. - 4 Dec. 2002 (Issue No. 614)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2002/614/re7.htm