Middle East Other States Democracy, not terror, is the engine of political Islam | Democracy, not terror, is the engine of political Islam |
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| Saturday, 22 September 2007 | ||||||
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Neocon policies designed to promote liberal opinion in the Middle East have, in fact, played into the hands of the religious parties. William Dalrymple Six years after 9/11, throughout the Muslim world political Islam is on the march; the surprise is that its rise is happening democratically — not through the bomb, but the ballot box. Democracy is not the antidote to the Islamists the neocons once fondly believed it would be. Since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, there has been a consistent response from voters wherever Muslims have had the right to vote. In Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Pakistan, Egypt, Tu rkey and Algeria they have voted en masse for religious parties in a way they have never done before. Where governments have been most closely linked to the U.S., political Islam’s rise has been most marked. Real threat of violence
Yet, in concentrating on the violent jihadi fringe, we may have missed the main story. For, if the imminent Islamist takeover of western Europe is a myth, the same cannot be said for the Islamic world. Clumsy and brutal U.S. policies in the Middle East have generated revolutionary changes, radicalising even the most moderate opinion, with the result that the status quo in place since the 1950s has been broken. Egypt is typical: at the last election in 2005 members of the nominally banned Muslim Brotherhood, standing as independents, saw their representation rise from 17 seats to 88 in the 444-seat People’s Assembly — a five-fold increase, despite reports of vote-rigging by President Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic Alliance. The Brothers, who have long abjured violence, are now the main opposition. The figures in Pakistan are strikingly similar. Traditionally, the religious parties there have won only a fraction of the vote. That began to change after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. In October 2002, a rightwing alliance of religious parties — the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal or MMA — won 11.6 per cent of the vote, more than doubling its share, and sweeping the polls in the two provinces bordering Afghanistan — Baluchistan and the North West Frontier Province — where it formed ultra-conservative and pro-Islamist provincial governments. If the last election turned the MMA into a serious electoral force, there are now fears that it could yet be the principal beneficiary of the current standoff in Pakistan. The Bush administration proclaimed in 2004 that the promotion of democracy in the Middle East would be a major foreign policy theme in its second term. It has been widely perceived, not least in Washington, that this policy has failed. Yet, in many ways U.S. foreign policy has succeeded in turning Muslim opinion against the corrupt monarchies and decaying nationalist parties, who have ruled the region for 50 years. The irony is that rather than turning to liberal secular parties, as the neocons assumed, Muslims have lined up behind parties most clearly seen to stand up against aggressive U.S. intervention. Religious parties, in other words, have come to power for reasons largely unconnected to religion. As clear and unambiguous opponents of U.S. policy in the Middle East — in a way that, say, Musharraf, Mubarak and Mahmoud Abbas are not — religious parties have benefited from legitimate Muslim anger: anger at the thousands of lives lost in Afghanistan and Iraq; at the blind eye the U.S. turns to Israel’s nuclear arsenal and colonisation of the West Bank; at the horrors of Abu Ghraib and the incarceration of thousands of Muslims without trial in the licensed network of torture centres that the U.S. operates across the globe; and at the Islamophobic rhetoric that still flows from Bush and his circle in Washington. Moreover, the religious parties tend to be seen by the poor, rightly or wrongly, as representing justice, integrity and equitable distribution of resources. Hence the strong showing, for example, of Hamas against the blatantly corrupt Fatah in the 2006 elections in Palestine. Equally, the dramatic rise of Hizbollah in Lebanon has not been because of a sudden fondness for sharia law, but because of the status of Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah’s leader, as the man who gave the Israelis a bloody nose, and who provides medical and social services for the people of South Lebanon, just as Hamas does in Gaza. The usual U.S. response has been to retreat from its push for democracy when the “wrong” parties win. This was the case not just with the electoral victory of Hamas, but also in Egypt: since the Brothers’ strong showing in the elections, the U.S. has stopped pressing Mubarak to make democratic reforms, and many of the Brothers’ leading activists and business backers, as well as Mubarak’s opponent in the presidential election, are in prison, all without a word of censure from Washington. Here to stay
The reality is that, like the Copts, we are going to have to find some modus vivendi with political Islam. Pretending that the Islamists do not exist, and that we will not talk to them, is no answer. Only by opening dialogue are we likely to find those with whom we can work, and to begin to repair the damage that self-defeating Anglo-American policies have done to the region, and to western influence there, since 9/11. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007
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