An accommodation with political Islam?
What does Anthony Shadid mean?
There is a fear in the West, one rarely echoed here, that Egypt’s revolution could go the way of Iran’s, when radical Islamists ultimately commandeered a movement that began with a far broader base. But the two are very different countries. In Egypt, the uprising offers the possibility of an accommodation with political Islam rare in the Arab world — that without the repression that accompanied Mr. Mubarak’s rule, Islam could present itself in a more moderate guise.
What does he mean “an accommodation with political Islam”? And why does he couple that with the different subject of a potentially moderate Islam?
Political Islam means theocracy. It means government by Islam and according to sharia; it means religion and state are one and the same. A potentially moderate Islam means just that – in this context it means that most Muslims in Egypt could adhere to a moderate version of Islam. The two things don’t go together. Theocracy can’t be “moderate”; political Islam can’t be moderate. You can have more and less vicious political Islam, but you can’t have moderate political Islam any more than you can have moderate political Catholicism or Southern Baptistism.
The Arab world has a spectrum of Islamic movements, as broad as the states that have repressed them, from the most violent in Al Qaeda to the most mainstream in Turkey. Though cast for years as an insurgent threat by Mr. Mubarak, the Brotherhood in Egypt has long disavowed its violent past, and now has a chance to present itself as something more than a force for opposition to Mr. Mubarak’s authoritarianism.
But Islamic movements are Islamist movements, and they shouldn’t be prettied up by being called “mainstream.” There is more to fear from the Muslim Brotherhood than what Shadid seems to mean by “its violent past.” (There’s the “Brotherhood” aspect just for a start. To belabor the obvious: it excludes women.)
“The people are aware this time,” said Essam Salem, a 50-year-old resident there. “They’re not going to let them seize power. People aren’t going to be deceived again. This is a popular revolution, a revolution of the youth, not an Islamic revolution.”
That’s the first hopeful note in the article. I hope it’s true, and in fact it seems highly plausible; it’s not as if the nature of Iran is a secret, nor is the fact that Iran is packed with people who would rebel if they could but prefer not to be thrown into Evin and then hanged.
While [the MB] remains deeply conservative, it engages less in sometimes frivolous debates over the veil or education and more in demands articulated by the broader society: corruption, joblessness, political freedom and human rights abuses.
Yes but that could be a smokescreen. It could be a Trojan horse. Try not to be totally naïve.
The cause and effect here seems a rather dangerous assumption.
Isn’t this what we heard, from some quarters, about Hamas?
Islam means submission (to Allah). How is that at all compatible with the idea of freedom or liberty? Not even the Egyptians seem aware about what freedom means, to them, it means freedom from Mubarak, there appears much less concern about who or what replaces Mubarak.
To me, there was never a revolution in Egypt, only a protest. There was no forced takeover of state television. There was no storming of Mubarak’s palace and the overthrow of the military/state police nor was there any breaking down of any walls.
I think Egyptians have got a taste of what freedom and its consequences are by the internet. It means you can start your own facebook page and start building an online identity, and you can buy cool stuff like iphones or have buy fashionable clothes. Freedom means being wealthy and gaining social status, that is what Egyptians want. Things like freedom to think and criticise (Islam) are not part of the package. It’s just given that Islam should rule as law, but not that bad Islam in other countries, that’s not Egyptian Islam!
Egbert you are so right. How often do we hear of mainstream islam not being extremist – it’s always those other guys with the bombs and AK47s……Did we learn nothing from what happened in Iraq? It wasn’t just a handful of extremists blowing and shooting each other up – it was general mayhem that didn’t begin to quieten down for several years after the US invasion. What do we see in Pakistan? Is it just a few extremists yelling, screaming and blowing things up – no, it’s practically the norm. Look what’s happening to the ahmediya muslims who may actually be peaceful. They’re made unislamic, apostates and the subject of fatwa and the attendant attack and murder that brings. It isn’t just a few extremists, it’s normal muslims like shopkeepers in london…….Have we learned nothing from Afghanistan? Nine years later and we’re still trying to cleanup a handful of extremists. Why? because either due to fear or approval they have the support of much of the population. One could go on and on but you only need to read the koran for yourself. Don’t believe what certain muslims say is in there, read it for yourself. See how little room there is for “interpretation”.
Then tell the truth and be called islamophobic! Well I’m not islamophobic – my fear of islam is all too rational
True enough. Still, history teaches that there is no route to rationality that doesn’t run through religious reform. That may seem impossible in the case of Islam but, if so, we’re fucked. And there are moderate Muslims. In the West, most Egyptians, Iranians, Turks, Iraqis, and Jordanians we meet at work and in our neighborhoods are properly recognized as such. People ask, “Why don’t they renounce the extremists?” Anybody here have family in Mississippi? Why didn’t they? Any of the white men here make sure to point out that Jared Lee Loughner doesn’t speak for us?
It ain’t easy, folks, and we do need to guard against appeasement; we actually are surrounded by people who are committed to undermining our freedoms. None of us here will live to see Islam disarmed but, for right now, standing with those whom the fundamentalists wish to oppress first isn’t a bad start.
I think it is at least possible that you have a quasi-religious state that is moderate and liberal to some extent. England’s never been a truly secular state – it’s always had a state religion – but since 1688 at least, it’s tended to be one of the more tolerant and liberal countries in Europe. I have to point out, I’m not arguing that having a religion and the state married together is in anyway a good thing. The Church of England’s position is a weird anachronism and shouldn’t exist in a modern democracy.
Also, I haven’t seen any sign of equivalent religion/ state accommodation in Islamic countries. Over time, the CofE essentially allowed itself to become a ceremonial arm of an increasingly secular state. Off the top of my head, the only similar situation I can think of in recent history is Israel, where an a very secular government allowed religion to control areas like marriage as a sop to more religious Jews. If Egypt or any other country had a similar system where government and institutions were basically secular and democratic, apart from a few official ceremonies and some silly and overly intrusive laws forbidding anything but Islamic marriage ceremonies, well I guess you could call that a moderate form of Islamic politics. But I really doubt the Muslim Brotherhood are going to be happy with that.
I probably don’t know enough to comment on this, but it seems to me that there is a lot of wishful speculation about the future of Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood has been kept out of politics, since it was really an outlaw oranisation. As in Algeria, Islamist government has been excluded largely by force. Is it so clear that the future is not Islamist, and that in this respect Egypt may soon make common cause with places like Saudi Arabia? There is enough contempt for the West in most Muslim majority countries to make that a very real possibility. And if Egypt were to go that way, could this be avoided elsewhere? Liberal democracy only works where religion takes second place, and where there is some impetus towards a separation of church and state, accompanied by the idea of the rule of (secular) law. Does it seem very likely that Egypt will do better than Weimar in maintaining a democratic system? I think the future is very uncertain, and the record of Islam in creating free societies is not encouraging. What might the West have done to assist in the transition? Perhaps people are working madly in the background, but it all seems very much a matter of wait and see, but surely, the great secular democracies are experiments in freedom, and we have much to teach those who have not yet achieved it.
Sean, one problem with that is that “marriage” isn’t some little minor back-corner thing that it’s ok to hand over to clerics. If clerics are in charge of marriage laws, women lose all their rights!
Eric, I don’t know, but people who want no part of Islamism have high hopes for Egypt, so I’m thinking they know something. It is at least possible that most Egyptians want nothing to do with Islamism either. I’m very wary though. I just don’t know.
An excellent documentary on Egypt was aired last night in Australia on SBS TV. It can be downloaded from the link below.
From that site:
Islamists have not played a significant role in the demonstrations. (It would be all over Fox News if they had.) And I don’t think those eager for a world caliphate would have enjoyed the footagemuch
at all. Too much spontaneity and joy over Mubarak’s inability to muster the appropriate military support, and over his subsequent fall.
The first thing a threatened autocracy does as an attempt to retain power is to offer concessions. The Egyptians were offered a series, ending with the big one: Mubarak’s resignation and flight out.
Now the anti-democrats will play for time, seeking to stall and derail the movement. But the cat is now out of the bag. There can be no serious suggestion that ‘the Arab street does not want democracy’. If the ‘people power’ that forced Mubarak out is not democracy, then the word has very little meaning.
Islamic clerics now have their work cut out to persuade the street that Islam and democracy are compatible: no easy task. In their view, the proper role of Islam is to be the state, and run it.
http://www.sbs.com.au/dateline/story/about/id/600921/n/Egypt-s-Revolution
Also ‘Cleaning Up Cairo’ at http://newmatilda.com/2011/02/14/cleaning-cairo
I do hope this will influence women and men in Egypt.
In our society it’s 1967. in Muslim society it’s…….hurry up we’re waiting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FOUqQt3Kg0
Just a little bit.
I think one of the major problems is people miss what is about the West that the rest of the world tends to be anti – it isn’t really the ideals.
It is how the West has a tendency to support dictators for fear of what the people would actually vote for – and what it means for Western assets in non-Western countries.
This means that to a lot of non-Westerners Western doesn’t mean equality and democracy, but rather equality and democracy for Westerners. If non-Western children are getting harmed by some practice or another – well that’s a small price to pay for a generally politically favourable leadership. This is one of the reasons why multi-culturualism is such a failure.
The aim the West’s mulitculturalism has is often to avoid rocking the boat – so it tends to end up maintaining monsters as a compromise in which the people it claims to be compromising with aren’t consulted. The result of this is of course that you get people who are anti-Western ideals managing to do a lot of damage while masquerading as being anti-Western practices.
One issue I think gets overlooked too often is why Islamist political organisations prove so popular in the Arab world.
One reason is that these groups tend to organise at a grass-roots level in socially and economically deprived communities, and provide services that are not being provided by the Government. People tend to like have access to healthcare and education and this is often what these Islamist groups provide.
Freedom is not the goal of democracy; freedom is the goal of reason. Reason is why people have democracies (in their representative forms), not because democracy is a good thing, but because all other systems are far worse. Reason is what drives politics toward democracy. Democracy does not achieve freedom, only oppression of the majority onto the minority.
This is the error in the Arab World, to think that once a country has democracy, then freedom and wealth will follow. Everything about the European enlightenment and its progress has come from the idea that reason rules over authority or belief. Once intellectuals, journalists, politicians are free to reason and criticise, to determine their own lives, only then can you have a functional democracy free from majority rule. Only then can you generate a free society and a wealthy society, regulated to control corruption and a rational social system that redistributes wealth to the poorest.
Democracy and representative government are not necessarily identical.
I am not an expert, so grain of salt, but my understanding of the MB in Egypt (it’s very, very different elsewhere) is that it has two main factions: a pro-theocratic-but-anti-terrorist faction, and a non-theocratic reform faction. This tension comes out just looking at the last decade. In the reform faction columns, you have the fact that it has run at least one woman for election (Wikipedia is incomplete) and support for Christians and Jews (no mention of atheists, sadly… baby steps?). On the other hand, in a draft party platform proposal in 2007 it called for excluding women and non-Muslims from certain political positions. So it depends on who wins out on this inner-party conflict. Best of luck to the reformists, they’ll need it.