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Democracy,
not terror, is the
engine of political Islam
Neocon policies designed to promote liberal opinion in the
Middle East have in fact played into the hands of the religious
parties
By William Dalrymple
09/21/07 "The
Guardian" -- - -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 US 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, Turkey
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 US, political Islam's rise has been
most marked.
Much western journalism in the six years since 9/11 has
concentrated on terrorist groups, jihadis and suicide bombers.
But while the threat of violence remains very real, those
commentators who have compared what they ignorantly call "Islamofascism"
to the Nazis are guilty of hysteria: the differences in relative
power and military capability are too great for the comparison
to be valid, and the analogies that the neocons draw with the
second world war are demonstrably false. As long as the west
interferes in the Muslim world, bombs will go off; and as long
as Britain lines up behind George Bush's illegal wars, British
innocents will die in jihadi atrocities. But that does not mean
we are about to be invaded, nor is Europe about to be
demographically swamped, as North American commentators such as
Mark Steyn claim: Muslims will make up no more than 10% of the
European population by 2020.
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 US 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 US invasion of Afghanistan.
In October 2002 a rightwing alliance of religious parties - the
Muttahida Majlis Amal or MMA - won 11.6% 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 principle 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 US 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 US intervention.
Religious parties, in other words, have come to power for
reasons largely unconnected to religion. As clear and
unambiguous opponents of US 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 US 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 US 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
Hizbullah in Lebanon has not been because of a sudden fondness
for sharia law, but because of the status of Hassan Nasrallah,
Hizbullah'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 US 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 US 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.
Yet on a recent visit to Egypt I found everywhere a strong
feeling that political Islam was there to stay, and that this
was something everyone was going to have to learn to live with;
the US response had become almost irrelevant. Even the Copts
were making overtures to the Brothers. As Youssef Sidhom, who
edits the leading Coptic newspaper, put it: "They are not going
away. We need to enter into dialogue, to clarify their policies,
and end mutual mistrust."
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.
William Dalrymple is the author of The Last Mughal: The Fall
of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857. - Please visit his website -
www.williamdalrymple.com
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