WORLD VIEW:THERE'S A nice, ironic symmetry to the discomfort of the Iranian regime at the Egyptian contagion and the continuing ambivalence of western leaders to it because of fears it will be "hijacked" by Islamists.
The spectre of the Iranian revolution in 1979 haunts both: the fear of Islamism coming to power; and precisely that Islamism may also yet be hoist on its own petard, displaced by a similar uprising in Tehran.
Iranian opposition leaders are calling the mullahs’ bluff, testing their disingenuous enthusiasm for Egypt’s “Muslim” revolution, by challenging them to a allow a solidarity march on Monday.
President Hosni Mubarak has played the Islamist-threat card masterfully for years, as the US-allied regimes in Saudi, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Israel continued to do in recent days, urging Washington not to demand his departure.
But necessity is forcing a reappraisal of the real nature of this threat. Are Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and regional sister organisations really stalking horses for al-Qaeda? In truth the crude caricaturing of Islamism as a monolithic form of jihadism, incapable of coexisting with secular democracy, bent on exporting mayhem, reflects both a dangerous western paranoia and a real weakness of its intelligence.
Now there is a scramble to catch up with a much more complex, and in truth less frightening reality, not least in a rereading of the profoundly different nature of 1979, essentially a theocratic uprising from the start. Although moderates held sway after the Shah’s overthrow, Ayatollah Khomeini, in exile in Paris, was from the start the spiritual leader of the protests, a role reinforced by the special place and authority of mullahs in Shia Islam.
In Egypt, where there has been no evidence of religious leadership in the protests, the character of the banned but tolerated MB is also a reflection of the country’s Sunni tradition in which there is no formal clerical authority.
By most estimates the MB enjoys support of only about 20 per cent, although electoral fraud by the regime makes the picture unclear.
But that is not out of line with the wider picture. A regional study (Kurzman and Naqvi) of 89 parliamentary contests held throughout the Muslim world over the last 40 years found that the “median Islamic-party performance is 15.5 per cent of votes and 15 per cent of seats”. That reality suggests Islamists probably would not win free elections. In Egypt, the well-organised MB – its slogan is “Islam is the solution” – would do well but secular parties are likely to be in the majority.
The MB, pragmatic and long committed to non-violence, is also strikingly different from Iran’s theocrats. The party, like that in Tunisia, insists it does not intend to contest the presidency and has manifested a pragmatism and caution typical, Brookings Institution scholar Shadi Hamid observes, of similar parties in the region: “a peculiar feature” of mainstream Islamist parties is their “reluctance . . . to win elections and often their . . . accommodation with regimes in order not to rock the boat”.
In Arab countries, Islamist groups rarely contest all available seats and often accommodate themselves to the regimes in power to ensure that they do not exceed an accepted “threshold”. In the 2007 polls, the Jordanian IAF ran only 22 candidates under the banner “musharika wa laisa mughaliba” – “participating but not seeking a majority”.
Part of the reason is the experience of Algeria in 1992 when the military, supported to varying degrees by Europe and the US, cancelled elections after the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) looked poised to win a majority – some 100,000 died in the civil war that followed. “Since then,” Hamid writes, “no Sunni Islamist party in the Arab world has entered an election intending to win.”
“Our phobia is Algeria,” Jordanian Islamist Ishaq Farhan once argued explaining the organisation’s electoral restraint.
Such groups are also not primarily political parties, preoccupied exclusively with political power, but social movements – the MB operates as a state-within-a-state, with its own set of parallel institutions, including hospitals, schools, banks, social clubs and even scout troops. It has calculated that in authoritarian regimes the too-overt push for power threatens those wider roles.
That ambivalence about political power is reflected in the back seat taken in the protests. But within the organisation, notably since 9/11, there has also been a gradual embrace of democratic values and the idea of pluralism. The MB has run its own internal elections since 2004 and many leading lights openly advocate the Turkish model that has seen the ruling Islamist Law and Justice Party (AKP) accept the idea of a secular state and pluralism in a role akin to Europe’s Christian Democrats.
“The Muslim Brotherhood, whenever asked, insists they don’t want an Iranian-style theocracy and that the model they are looking to is the AK Party’s,” Hillel Fradkin, of the Centre on Islam, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World at the Hudson Institute told Bloomberg. Likewise, Tunisia’s leading Islamist Rachid Ghannouchi insisted to the agency that his country is socially and culturally “close to Turkey, closer than it is to Iran or Afghanistan”.
The MB will certainly play a part in any new, representative Egyptian government and will undoubtedly create some problems for the West, not least on issues like the Middle East peace process But instead of demonising the party and backing authoritarian alternatives to democracy, the West must now recognise the inevitable and begin to engage with what Turkey is demonstrating to be a viable coexistence of Islamist and democratic values.
