Islam and Power

The political Islamist movement has changed over the last 15 years. Through much of the 1980s and 1990s, Islamic fundamentalists had revolutionary aims. They sought the violent overthrow of Western-allied regimes to have them replaced with Islamic states. This desire for Islamic states and not Western-style democracies was at the core of their message. Often transnational in their objectives, they spoke in global terms. But it turned out that the appeal of this ideology was limited. People in Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and countless other places rejected it; in fact, they grudgingly accepted the dictatorships they lived under rather than support violent extremism. In this sense, political Islam did fail.

But over time, many of the Islamists recognized this reality and began changing their program. They came to realize that shorn of violent overthrow, revolution and social chaos, their ideas could actually gain considerable popular support. So they reinvented themselves, emphasizing not revolutionary overthrow but peaceful change, not transnational ideology but national reform. They were still protesting the dictators, but now they organized demonstrations in favor of democracy and honest politics.

There were extremist elements, of course, still holding true to the cause of the caliphate, and they broke off to create separate groups like Al Qaeda. (Some of this radicalism remains within the diaspora communities of Europe more strongly than in the Middle East itself.) But it is notable that well before 9/11, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood condemned terrorism directed against the Mubarak regime, and it recently distanced itself even from the tactics of the Iraqi insurgency. It has sought instead to build support for its own social and political program in Egypt. For its part, not only did Hamas decide to participate in the elections—for the first time—but it campaigned almost entirely on a platform of anticorruption, social services and assertive nationalism. Only Al Qaeda and its ilk have condemned any participation in elections, whether by Iraqi Islamist groups or by Hamas.

This coming to terms with democracy, however, should not be mistaken for a coming to terms with Western values such as liberalism, tolerance and freedom. The program that most of these groups espouse is deeply illiberal, involving the reversal of women's rights, second-class citizenship for minorities and confrontation with the West and Israel. The most dramatic example of these trends is in southern Iraq, where Shiite religious parties rule without any checks. Reports abound that civil servants and professors are subjected to religious and political tests, women are placed under strictures never before enforced in Iraq, and all kinds of harmless entertainment are being silenced by vigilantes. When entering the office of Iraq's prime minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, one now sees women swaddled in veils and gloves, a level of zeal rarely seen elsewhere in the Muslim world.

Some of these forces have gained strength because of a lack of other alternatives. For decades the Middle East has been a political desert. In Iraq, the reason that there are no countervailing liberal parties is that Saddam Hussein destroyed them. He could not completely crush mosque-based groups and, by the end of his reign, he actually used them to shore up his own legitimacy. In much of the Muslim world Islam became the language of political opposition because it was the only language that could not be censored. This pattern, of dictators using religious groups to destroy the secular opposition, played itself out in virtually every Arab country, and often beyond. It was the method by which Pakistan's Gen. Zia ul-Haq maintained his own dictatorship in the 1980s, creating a far stronger fundamentalist movement than that country had ever known.

The broader reason for the rise of Islamic politics has been the failure of secular politics. Secularism exists in the Middle East. It is embodied by Saddam Hussein and Muammar Kaddafi and Hosni Mubarak and Yasir Arafat. Arabs believe that they have tried Western-style politics and it has brought them tyranny and stagnation. They feel that they got a bastardized version of the West and that perhaps the West was not the right model for them anyway. Islamic fundamentalism plays deeply to these feelings. It evokes authenticity, pride, cultural assertiveness and defiance. These ideas have been powerful sources of national identity throughout history and remain so, especially in an age of globalized economics and American power. In face of the powerlessness, alienation and confusion that the modern world breeds, these groups say simply, "Islam is the solution."

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