1989 As a Political World Event by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-134-65431-4
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Political changes

The failure of political Islam: Islamists have changed, or at least understood that the world has changed. Either in success (Iran, Gaza) or failure (Algeria, Syria and Egypt before the Arab Spring), the Islamists have been unable to bring about a successful model of Islamic state. They own their present success to the success of the “others”: democratic secularists or nationalists. They won in Gaza on a nationalist agenda, not Islamic, and the same is true for the Lebanese Hezbollah, who built its success on its ability to represent the Shi’a community and on opposing Israel. In opposition, in jail and in exile, they came into contact with other opponents, more secularist or defenders of human rights: when they go into exile, it is more often London than Mecca. They understood the need to make alliances and to take into account other views. They tried to engage the West (but were too often rebuked). The calls for Jihad and for violent confrontation are the trademarks of countries or groups that are not friendly to them, and even consider them as traitors: Iran or Al Qaeda. Implementation of sharia is the official policy of regimes and movements they cannot identify with: Saudi Arabia or the Taliban. Their social agenda has slowly faded away (except for charities) with the gentrification of their constituencies (more and more bourgeois and entrepreneurs). The aging of their leadership put them at odds with the new generation of believers. There is a cultural gap between the Islamists and the younger generation, which is not about Islam, but about what it means to be a believer.

All these changes gave way to what I called post-Islamism (the expression has been used first by Assef Bayat):6 it does not mean that the Islamists disappeared, but that their utopia did not stand in front of social, political and even geo-strategic realities: they have no blueprint for an “Islamic economy”, and although they run many charities in deprived neighbourhoods, they tended to become socially conservative, opposing strikes and approving the rescinding of the agrarian reform in Egypt. The wave of religious revival that has swept the Muslim world did not swell their ranks, but contributed on the contrary to the diversification of the religious field, transforming the Islamists into religious actors among others.

Have the Islamists become “democrats”? They have clearly been favouring elections for some time because support for armed struggle was either playing into the hands of jihadists or of repressive governments seeking support from the West as the best bulwark against a “radical Islamist threat”. Rachid Ghannouchi, the leader of Nahda, explicitly rejected the concept of an “Islamic state”, and took the Turkish AKP as a model of a post-Islamism religious-minded and conservative party.

But still most Islamists are uneasy about sharing power with non-Islamic parties and turning their “brotherhood” kind of organizations into a modern political party. They sometimes give up formal support for sharia (as in Tunisia and Morocco) but are unable to define a concrete ruling programme

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