Islamism, Arab Spring, and the Future of Democracy by Leonid Grinin & Andrey Korotayev & Arno Tausch

Author:Leonid Grinin & Andrey Korotayev & Arno Tausch
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319910772
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Secular or Islamists Vector?

Of course, already in 2011 the most burning question was whether in the Arab Spring countries political power could finally find itself in the hands of the radical Islamists. This possibility was noted by many analysts as early as in 2011 (see, e.g., Mirskiy 2011). And, of course, after the Arab Spring one could observe, say, in Egypt and Tunisia, a clear activization of Islamists, growing demands to introduce “Islamic” laws, etc. Note, however, that the leading positions here in 2011–2012 belonged to moderate rather than radical Islamists. In Tunisia in October 2011, the most successful party at the Constituent Assembly elections turned out to be a moderately Islamist Ennahda. Under the toppled former President of Tunisia Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, this party was strictly banned. In Egypt in the post-revolution parliamentary elections held in November 2011–January 2012 45% of all the seats in the parliament were won by the moderately Islamist Freedom and Justice Party [a political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt (see Chap. 3 above for the history of this organization)] and its allies. Twenty-five percent of seats were obtained by the ultra-conservative (“Salafite”) Islamist al-Nour Party and its allies [note, however, that this party demonstrated a very high level of pragmatism in 2013 (see, e.g., Grinin and Korotayev 2016b; Korotayev et al. 2016)]. Thus, by January 2012 the Islamist parties obtained a qualified two-thirds majority—though the growing disagreement between them (fueled by the Qatari-Saudi competition) did not allow them to form a solid parliamentary block. The rest of the seats were divided first of all between the oldest Egyptian secular political (liberal) party Wafd (9.2%) and the social liberal Egyptian Block (al-Kutlah al-Misriyyah) (8.9%). One could not exclude the possibility of further intensification of the struggle between the forces of modernization and fundamentalism as many aspects of modernization became somehow frozen in 2011 (especially as regards family and gender aspects). Yet, there were grounds to expect that in the immediate future we would see a definite consolidation of the positions of Islamists—at the very least because their movements were much more organized than the secular ones (Khalaf 2011).

Such developments are rather usual during revolutionary periods. Regimes are toppled by the most ideologically advanced groups, whereas the post-revolution voting often goes in favor of conservative forces that are based on a rather conservatively oriented primary mass of people. Some parties of secular revolutionary liberals try to protest, crying about the “betrayed revolution,” or the “stolen revolution,” but they seem to be late. We will discuss this in detail in what follows.

The Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu noted in his speech in Knesset on the February 1, 2011: “The recent history of the Middle East demonstrates numerous precedents when Islamist elements used for their criminal aims democratic rules of game in order to come to power.” He cited Iran, Lebanon, and the Ghazzah Strip as examples (Yaron 2011). Already in February 2011 Israeli analysts believed that the Muslim Brothers’ coming to power

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