by Emile Nakhleh
Does repression force Islamic parties to moderate? This is the key question Shadi Hamid raises in his seminal book on political Islam, governance, and Islamist “illiberal” democratic ideology.
Temptations of Power: Islamists & Illiberal Democracy In a New Middle East is a first-rate, thorough, yet controversial study of what drives [...]]]>
by Emile Nakhleh
Does repression force Islamic parties to moderate? This is the key question Shadi Hamid raises in his seminal book on political Islam, governance, and Islamist “illiberal” democratic ideology.
Temptations of Power: Islamists & Illiberal Democracy In a New Middle East is a first-rate, thorough, yet controversial study of what drives political Islam as well as the complex relationship between political Islam and repressive regimes. The focus is on Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Tunisia’s Ennahda, and Jordan’s Islamic Action Front.
The book is a welcome primer on contemporary political Islam and should be a required reading for students, academics, policymakers, policy and intelligence analysts, and anyone interested in the contemporary Middle East and the rise of Islamic political parties and movements. The author focuses on mainstream Sunni Islamist movements, the largest and most established of which is the Muslim Brotherhood, traces Islamists’ brush with political power, and examines at length their performance once in power, as in Egypt and Tunisia.
Shadi Hamid, a Fellow at the Brookings Institution, has spent several years interviewing Islamic activists and political party leaders in Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia. He started writing the book before the eruption of the Arab revolutions in 2011 and interviewed numerous senior leaders and thinkers of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, including the deposed Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi. The author’s deep expertise in political Islam’s ideologies, politics, governing style, and tactics is clearly visible in this highly welcome book.
Key Arguments
The author advances several hypotheses, which should keep scholars of political Islam occupied for years to come. Perhaps his most controversial thesis is that regime repression has pushed Islamists “along a more moderate path.” He examines “two distinct phases in the Islamist narrative—one defined by the experience of repression and the other by the democratic openings made possible by the Arab revolutions.”
Islamists’ electoral strategies were carefully developed in order not to arouse the suspicions of the regime, the ruling party, or other non-Islamist parties. By running a limited number of candidates in any particular election, Islamists emphasized their motto of “participation not domination.”
While Islamists opted for elections and political participation in Egypt and Jordan, according to Hamid, they were far from being liberal democrats. The Muslim Brotherhood, for example, views itself not as a traditional political party but as a religious, social, and educational movement or organization.
Despite their active participation in electoral politics, “the goal of Islamist groups is the ‘Islamization’ of society, [which] goes well beyond the political realm.” The author expertly discusses the stages of Islamization, which the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups have pursued to Islamize the individual, the family, and the society at large. Once in power, Islamists have pursued a form of “illiberal democracy” by infringing on the liberties of others. In essence, moderation in the past four decades has not made Islamists liberal democrats.
Islamists have been more comfortable in opposition than in power. Rachid Ghannouchi, head of the Tunisian Enmahda, according to the author, warned Islamists that they would be “loved by the people before they get to power and then hated afterward.”
The book’s central argument, which is perhaps the most controversial as well, is that regime tolerance of the opposition, including allowing more political freedoms, did not necessarily lead to moderating policies promoted by Islamists. On the contrary, the author asserts, “increasing levels of repression, rather than resulting in radicalization, can have amoderating effect on Islamist groups, pushing them to reconsider and redefine their policy priorities.”
Islam, Politics, and Ideology
As governing parties, Islamists have sought popular support for their policies by moving to the center. The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) preached that “freedom and Islamization were not opposed but rather went hand in hand.” In the hundreds of hours of interviews, which the author conducted with MB activists and leaders, he sought to understand how and why Islamists adopted more moderate ideologies when they actually gained state power.
He challenges the prevailing view in academic literature, which states that Islamists moderate in response to “political participation and inclusion.” He tosses out the accepted “inclusion-moderation” hypothesis and the so-called “pothole theory of democracy” which maintain that when in power Islamists tend to focus on bread-and-butter issues and less on ideology. Hamid strongly argues that engaging Islamists, either on the part of the ruling regime or by outside actors, does not automatically push them to moderate.
This is a radical challenge not only to academic theorizing about Islamists’ political strategies but also to Western governments’ policies of Muslim world engagement, especially since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Policy makers in Western countries have urged authoritarian regimes in the Arab Muslim world to open up their political systems and allow mainstream Islamists to contest the political space. Regimes are told that as Islamists experience more freedom and less repression, they would move away from radicalization and extremism and move toward the moderate center.
By contrast, the author argues that, when faced with extreme repression and the threat of eradication by the regime, Islamists tend to moderate. Despite continued regime repression and the massive arrests and convictions of MB leaders, the Muslim Brotherhood’s commitment to democratic politics has remained unshakeable. The MB followed a similar policy during Mubarak’s repressive regime. In the 1980s and 1990s, the MB formed political alliances with other parties in order to elect some of their members to the national legislature—first, with the Wafd Party and then with the Labor Socialist Party. Later on, MB parliamentary candidates ran for elections as independents.
Despite Egypt’s “turn to repression” in the 1990s, the MB continued to participate in parliamentary elections and to reach out to the West with their message of moderation, pragmatism, pluralism, and inclusion. In response to regime accusations in the 1990s depicting the Islamists as “regressive and close-minded,” the MB submitted more detailed statements to the public and to the outside world emphasizing their commitment to pragmatism and inclusion. The MB’s 1994 statement included sophisticated analysis of their commitment to pluralism, inclusion, women’s rights, and minority (read Christian) rights.
The last chapter “The Past and Future of Political Islam,” offers a brilliant analysis of the political ideology of political Islam, the recent experiences of political Islamists, and the lessons the region and the international community should take from these experiences. Although the MB committed huge political and ideological errors in its first year in office under Mohamed Morsi, it would be naïve and shortsighted to see the experience as a failure of political Islam itself. Although Morsi’s failure resulted from policies of a specific Islamist party in a particular country under unique circumstances, it could offer instructive lessons to other Islamist political parties that aspire to govern.
Concluding Comment
Sophisticated as this book is, the author did not establish a convincing causal relationship between repression and moderation and whether Islamists’ moderation was a response to regime repression or a strategy for survival.
For example, why was the MB “forced” to moderate, as Hamid puts it? If MB Islamists were “forced to moderate by their circumstance,” did those circumstances include regime repression, popular calls for democracy, the fear of liquidation by the regime, or a desire to win elections? Did the Islamists’ moderation reflect liberal tendencies or an innate desire to survive under repression? Were the frequent compromises the MB in Egypt and the Islamic Action Front in Jordan made in response to regime repression a sign of moderation or a strategy for survival? Was the shift the Muslim Brotherhood made toward political participation in the mid-1990s tactical or strategic? These critical questions are too often left begging.
Hamid does an excellent job, on the other hand, in discussing the role of foreign actors, especially the United States, in the MB’s evolving stance on democratic politics.
]]>Weiss mainly focuses on Israel-Palestine and human [...]]]>
Weiss mainly focuses on Israel-Palestine and human rights in the Middle East. He also headed “Just Journalism”, a media monitoring organization focused on “how Israel and Middle East issues are reported in the UK” prior to its September 2011 closure (lack of funding was cited). His own work has been widely published and last month Foreign Affairs printed his “What it Will Take to Intervene in Syria“, where he argued that intervention “at this moment would be premature” and then proceeded to describe how it could be executed anyway. Less than a month later the crux of Weiss’s position is that Bashar al-Assad is no longer a legitimate leader and Iran and Russia are already “intervening” in Syria, so the West should too:
…Russia, Iran and Hezbollah have all been “intervening” in Syria’s internal affairs for ten months now. Meanwhile, the Arab League, the United States and the European Union have all determined that any claim to sovereignty Assad might have had in 2011 is null and void in 2012. What is needed, therefore, is not condemnations, demarches and shuttered embassies but a Western equivalent of intervention in Syria, namely in the form of:
- • Humanitarian “safe areas” to provide food, aid and medical supplies to the civilian population and give the various opposition groups a headquarters inside their own country
• Advanced weapons and communication devices for the Syrian rebels
• A no-fly zone to stop the regime from using its aircraft to conduct reconnaissance, offload security personnel and – yes – strafe rebel strongholds from the sky.
Weiss also strongly criticizes the US, UK and France for not working to push the Assad government out more forcibly:
Hillary Clinton, William Hague and Alain Juppe can grumble all they like about travesties at Turtle Bay and the inevitability of Assad’s fall. Even if they got their toothless Security Council resolution calling for Assad’s departure, then what? Would he pack up and go quietly? If so, where to? How’s the tabouleh in the Black Sea?
Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution, who supported intervention in Libya in the very early stages of the uprising, wrote in CNN today that Russia and China’s vetoing of last week’s United Nations draft Security Council resolution on Syria has made the reality on the ground more dangerous for Syrians. He accordingly urges more consideration of the “various military options available” (while conceding that taking such action is currently premature) and makes the case that Western powers have in fact been reluctant to intervene despite growing necessity:
The “anti-imperialists” will, as they often do, cry foul. This time, though, they will find themselves on the wrong side. None of the Western powers has come out in even tepid support of military intervention. Consumed by their own internal problems, this is not at all something they want. But it may be something the Syrian people need.
Yesterday US intelligence veteran and foreign policy analyst Paul Pillar wrote that one reason why Russia and China vetoed the UN draft resolution was because of their experience with Libya:
The Russians in particular made it clear they were determined not to fall again for what they regarded as a bait and switch on Libya, in which a NATO military intervention that received multilateral support on humanitarian grounds quickly morphed into support for toppling the Libyan regime.
Pillar appears to be adamantly on the anti-intervention side. He argues that foreign intervention in Libya has given Iran and North Korea “the worst possible message” with respect to their own security interests and alleged nuclear ambitions and that “Sectarian divisions in Syria would make the aftermath of even a low-cost regime-toppling intervention messier than Libya.”
The American Security Projects’ Joshua Foust also weighed in on the Libya/Syria comparison in the context of the intervention debate in the Atlantic today:
In a vacuum, intervening to prevent mass killings in Libya made sense. Libya, however, did not (and does not) exist in a vacuum. It has both internal and regional politics. So does Syria. The failure to gain international buy-in to do something — not necessarily militarily but some response — to the atrocities there is a direct consequence of interventionists ignoring politics in their rush to do good. Unfortunately, the people of Syria are now paying the price, and will continue to do so.
As reported by Josh Rogin in Foreign Policy, this weekend several members of congress touched on the Syria intervention debate at the 2012 Munich Security Conference as well. Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry echoed Pillar and Foust’s argument that “Syria is not Libya” but added that:
…nobody should interpret that statement to suggest that it means that Syrian leaders can rely on the notion that they can act with impunity and not expect the international community to assist the Syrian people in some way.
Interestingly, while senate hawks John McCain and Joe Lieberman had harsher words for Russia and China, they, like Kerry, avoided advocating intervention directly. According to Lieberman:
What’s happening in Syria today is exactly what we got involve in Libya to stop from happening…. I understand Syria is more complicated, but one choice we don’t have is just to stand back and let the government kill people who are fighting for their own freedom.
Pro-interventionists like Weiss aside, many of whom have been arguing for the West to go into Syria for months (consider the output of the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Foreign Policy Initiative on the issue), the trend in Washington seems to be that more could and should be done about Syria, but other considerations are getting in the way. Meanwhile, according to a poll conducted by Shibley Telhami in October, an overwhelming majority from the Arab countries he surveyed support the Syrian rebels over the government, but are divided about foreign intervention. During the question-answer period of the poll’s launch event at the Brookings Institution, Telhami added that Syrians themselves are also “divided” on the issue: “My suspicion is many Syrians want international intervention, many don’t.”
It will be interesting to see how ongoing brutality by Assad’s forces will affect this debate not only among the most important actors, the Syrian people, but foreign governments too.
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