In Washington and other Western capitals there is a view gaining ground that a popularly elected government in the Middle East is better than a shaky autocratic client. Maybe there is some element of truth in this. Yet there is still a marked reservation about going the extra mile and accepting that a free and open poll might bring Islamist parties to power. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said a few measured things about the need for next week’s Egyptian presidential election not to be a forgone conclusion but the US is hardly keeping the pressure on, presumably fearing an opening will be exploited by the Muslim Brotherhood with its “secret agenda”.
We have still not come far enough from the 1990 elections in Algeria when France, the former colonial master, and the US, ignored the fact that the Islamists had clearly won a majority and turned a blind eye when the army overturned the result, sparking a bloody civil war. Yet the truth is Islamist parties in many countries have faced enough persecution, prosecution, imprisonment, torture and repression to form an instinctive empathy for the calls and cause of democracy and human rights. Human rights, if the West is clever, should be the wedge that keeps their door open if and when they come to power.
The platform of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood calls for parliamentary rule, separation of powers and the protection of minorities. In the Lebanon the militant Hezbollah has adopted progressive stands on both social and religious issues. Both it and Hamas in Palestine are participating vigorously in electoral politics. In Morocco, Islamists are foursquare behind the government’s efforts to expand women’s rights.
As Reza Aslan wrote in a recent issue of Prospect magazine, “It is pluralism that defines democracy not secularism. And Islam has had a long and historic commitment to religious pluralism.” No other monotheistic religion can match the reverence with which the Qur’an speaks of other religious traditions.
With terrorist bombs in July causing mayhem once again in Egypt I will be told I’m naïve. Yet there is no evidence that these latest terrorist acts are linked to Gamma’a Islamiya, the organization founded and inspired by the theologian Sayed Qutb, the intellectual godfather of Al-Qaeda. Just three years ago Gamma’a’s jailed leaders confessed in a four-volume treatise that they had been wrong to attack both fellow-Muslims and tourists and said that their members had been forbidden to join Al-Qaeda. Apart from some isolated terrorist cells this is the predominant view today of all Egyptian Islamists.
Of course, there is no doubting that all over the Islamic world some “born-again Muslims” have been seduced by the call of violence. But the predominant trends in Islamic societies remain nonviolent, even more so following the havoc wrecked by Al-Qaeda and despite rising anti-Americanism brought on principally by the invasion of Iraq. The important trends to watch in contemporary Islamist theology are toward what Westerners call “human rights”. Islamist intellectuals like Rashid Ghanoushi, the Tunisian leader, and Abdal-Wahhab El-Affendi, the Sudanese writer, are now arguing that restoring Shariah law “from above” by political action is a “recipe for tyranny and violence”.
Many Islamic scholars are now relooking at the influential writings of the Iranian scholar, Jamaluddin Al-Afgani, who lived from 1838 to 1897. He preached a message of reform that has been dubbed the “Protestant Islam”. He argued that just as Islam had been open to absorbing Greek philosophy in the Middle Ages so it should be open to European ideas today. His protégé, Mohammed Abduh, started the Salafiya movement, identifying with the salafi (elders) of the early Muslim community. He preached the compatibility of revelation and reason and condemned the blind following of tradition. He had a great influence in Cairo as mufti of Al-Azhar University (whose mufti today is still one of Islam’s most outspoken liberals and influential preachers). He criticized polygamy, argued for the improved status of women. His associate, Qasim Amin, went further, denouncing veiling, social seclusion and the male’s unfettered right to divorce.
Fundamentalism, as Edward Mortimer wrote in his magisterial “Faith and Power”, should be properly seen as “an effort to define the fundamentals of one’s religion and a refusal to budge from them once defined. Surely anybody with serious religious beliefs of any sort must be a fundamentalist in this sense.” The West will not progress in its effort to replace autocratic regimes with democratic ones until it sheds its knee-jerk antipathy to Islamic fundamentalism.
