Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From Hillel Fradkin

Jon Alterman, in a piece for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (also here), addresses what he sees as a growing number of obituaries for political Islam. Alterman’s judgment about this trend is sober and reasonable: It is far too soon to tell. Although Alterman does not cite by name those who anticipate the impending death of political Islam, he does report their evidence. It consists chiefly in the travails of certain organizations—the Moroccan Justice and Development Party (PJD), the Jordanian Islamic Action Front (IAF) and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood—during 2007. In the first two cases, Islamist parties failed to increase their electoral position in the Moroccan and Jordanian parliaments respectively. In the case of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the issuance of its new political program is regarded by him and others as a sign of internal disunity and thus an obstacle to the advance of their political fortunes.

As he might have said, this is far too short a period to reach a firm judgment about the future of these organizations, let alone the future of political or radical Islam. Indeed, since he cites the French scholar Olivier Roy, it is worth noting that he—as well as his French colleague Gilles Kepel—announced the death of political Islam more than 15 years ago in several publications. In this they proved to be extremely premature, and the same may well prove to be the case with current proponents of the demise of political Islam.

At all events there is much counter-evidence. As Alterman notes, whatever the organizational travails of the movement, the Muslim world is presently in the grip of a very powerful trend of a “return” to Islamic sensibility and practice. As he puts it, “A growing number of Muslims start from the proposition that Islam is relevant to all aspects of their daily lives, and not merely the province of theology or personal belief.” Alterman defines this tendency as “neo-traditionalism” rather than as “traditionalism” simply.

This is a fair and proper distinction but it leads to a more trenchant conclusion than Alterman is willing to draw. For the proposition he cites is none other than the one propounded by political or radical Islam in all its forms from its effective beginning with the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. The fact that it is now widely embraced—its shorthand formula on the streets of the Muslim world is the slogan “Islam is the Solution”—demonstrates the enormous mass success that political or radical Islam has already achieved. It is true that various circumstances have contributed to the popularity of this view—for example the discrediting of various modern alternatives such as nationalism. But the embrace of this view would be inconceivable without the tireless work of political or radical Islam.

What are less clear are the issues surrounding the translation of political Islam’s vision into actual political power and rule. There are, as Alterman notes, places where that has been accomplished and still exists—his examples are Iran, Gaza and Saudi Arabia. One might add Afghanistan under the Taliban, Sudan for a period, certain parts of Northern Nigeria, a near-triumph in Algeria in the 1990s and, for the moment, certain parts of Northwest Pakistan. Skeptics of the future of political Islam point to the unhappy experience of the inhabitants of countries and places now or recently under “Islamic” rule as a sign of the general incapacity of political Islam to provide “a coherent theory of governance.”

But that has not prevented several “Islamic regimes” from maintaining themselves in power. Nor has the experience of such regimes prevented people in other parts of the Muslim world from seeking to emulate them in some fashion or other. In the latter case, the failures of political Islam may often be attributed to the abiding power of autocratic regimes and their disinclination to surrender control to Islamist (or any other) alternative form of rule.

Indeed, the criteria—“tolerance,” “dealing with difference”—by which Alterman and others seek to define the deficiencies and weakness of contemporary political Islam belong to Western conceptions of the requirements of politics. The absence of these concerns may well be deficiencies. But that they will constitute a weakness for political Islam is less clear.

The most recent and clearest example of this ambiguity was provided by a case cited by Alterman: the program announced by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. According to unnamed observers, this program was evidence that the “group was beset by intellectual contradictions and infighting.” Exactly what they meant is not indicated. But one is entitled to guess that they are referring to the fact that the Brotherhood leadership rejected the desire of some members to put forward a more “liberal” vision of governance in Egypt and effectively affirmed its past positions, prescribing a government which would implement Sharia and place non-Muslim Egyptians in a somewhat inferior political status.

It is not at all clear that this decision bespeaks a weakness in the Brotherhood even if it was preceded by an internal debate. Still less is it a sign of intellectual contradictions. For the Brotherhood maintained the coherence of its ideology as first laid down by its founder Hasan al-Banna. And it is this vision, and what has followed from it, to which the Brotherhood attributes its success to date, and through which it apparently believes it will continue to progress towards its goals. It is not easy to say that the Brotherhood, rather than the skeptics, is wrong.