CAIRO: In elections from Jordan to Morocco, most recently in Egypt and the Palestinian territories, Islamists have moved closer to power by shifting to the centre and campaigning for clean government and political freedoms.
Setting aside for the moment the conservative social agendas which were once the basis of their popular appeal, these movements with religious roots have started to take the lead on political reform causes in many parts of the central Arab lands.
Wherever authoritarian governments give them space, they have emerged as influential advocates of democratic government, belying critics who have called them intolerant theocrats.
They have also tended to push aside secular groups seen as ineffective elitists tarnished by association with the West.
“They are not being elected so that they can push for an Islamic state (but) so they can be solid professional members of parliament who are entrusted to ... change these systems from within,” said Josh Stacher, a Cairo-based political scientist.
The shift in priorities has taken years to come about but has accelerated as the Islamists start to make inroads into mainstream politics, winning in local and national elections and adopting the ways of conventional political parties.
While people in Europe and North America fret over what they see as a rising tide of Islamism hostile to their interests, many Middle East analysts see it as an inevitable, even healthy, change which Washington cannot and should not try to stop.
The most dramatic case was the electoral victory in January by Palestinian group Hamas, which soundly defeated a secular Fatah movement weakened by a history of corruption and what many Palestinians see as unilateral concessions to Israel.
Hamas, like Lebanon’s Hizbollah movement, does not recognise Israel and its fighters have carried out many suicide bombings against Israelis. Both groups say their weapons are only to resist Israeli occupation, not to impose their power internally.
Mainstream Islamist groups in countries like Egypt, Morocco and Jordan oppose the use of violence in domestic politics.
In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood won 88 of the 454 seats in parliament in November/December elections, five times as many as it won in 2000 and more than any opposition group has won since the overthrow of the monarchy in 1952. Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif said in an interview it could have won 40 seats more.
In Jordan and Morocco too, broad-based Islamist movements form the main challenge to existing governments, with internal political reform at the top of their agendas.
“The reality shown by Hamas’s victory is this: if fully free elections were held today in the rest of the Arab world, Islamist parties would win in most states,” said Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at the University of Maryland.
“Islamists remain the most well-organised alternative to governments, a situation that is unlikely to change soon.”
Election analysts and politicians say the Islamists have picked up many protest votes from people who are disillusioned with conventional political parties corrupted by power, even if they do not share the long-term goal of an Islamic state.
The Islamists have reassured voters by projecting that goal far into the future, subject to popular consent.
Saad Eddine Othmani, new leader of the Justice and Development Party in Morocco, called Islam “a point of reference” for his party, and the country as a whole.
“Today nobody contests this point of reference. What’s at stake is to have an open and modern reading of religion... Personally I think that priority goes to political reform,” he said in an interview with the online publication Telquel.
Hamas, trying to form a new Palestinian government, says it will not impose Islamic sharia law. It will encourage sharia but it will not issue laws, Hamas leaders say.
The Muslim Brotherhood has put sharia low on its agenda, saying its first mission is to persuade Egyptians to live righteous lives of their own accord.
Besides, in a country like Egypt, where about 80 per cent of women cover their hair and very few people drink alcohol, some of the most visible aspects of sharia are hardly controversial.
As Islamist politics gain ground, different groups have adopted varied and sometimes conflicting positions. In Kuwait, Islamist groups were divided on whether to let women vote.
In Egypt and elsewhere, some Islamist groups have broken away from the Islam of conventional theologians, presenting their religion as part of the country’s national heritage rather than a blueprint for law and social policies.
Hamas’s victory was the first of its kind since the Islamic Salvation Front took the lead in Algeria’s parliamentary polls in 1991. The army scrapped those elections, provoking a civil war which lasted over a decade and cost more than 150,000 lives.
Europe and the United States turned a blind eye to the Algerian army’s intervention, in the belief that unelected generals were preferable to democratically chosen Islamists.
It would be harder for Washington to take such a position today, after campaigning for the past two years in favour of democratic change in the Middle East.
Telhami said the United States should keep an open mind when groups such as Hamas win elections and come to power.
“Scepticism about the real aims of these groups should be balanced by openness to the possibility that their aims ... in power could differ from their aims as opposition groups.
This requires partial engagement (and) patience,” he said.—Reuters
