John Voll, Peter Mandaville, Steven Kull, Alexis Arieff
The following is an edited transcript of the sixty-eighth in a series of Capitol Hill conferences convened by the Middle East Policy Council. The meeting was held Wednesday, April 11, 2012, in the Rayburn House Office Building, with Thomas R. Mattair moderating.
THOMAS R. MATTAIR, executive director, Middle East Policy Council
Among the changes that are sweeping the Arab world, one of the most significant ones this year seems to be the success of what are often called Islamist movements but perhaps more accurately should be called movements within political Islam, "political Islam" being a term that means political ideology informed by the religion of Islam.
Today we'd like to identify some of the most important movements, some of the most important leaders, and ask a number of questions that are relevant particularly for an American audience: namely, does the United States even understand these movements well enough to know whether or not we should be concerned about their rise? We're talking here about the Party of Justice and Development in Morocco, Ennahda in Tunisia, leaders like Ali Sallabi in Libya, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan and Syria and their offshoot Hamas in Palestine, and even Shia movements like Al Wefaq in Bahrain.
Most Americans know that there is Arab Muslim anger at the United States, although they don't necessarily understand all the reasons for that because most Americans have not examined U.S. policies in the region very deeply or very critically. We in these conferences always try to do that, and we'll do it again today. But there are other deeper, more elementary questions that we need to ask.
For example, what do various movements in political Islam see as a social and political order that is compatible with their Islamic values and interests? What do they see as the proper relations with the other domestic players, including the secular ones? What do they see as the proper relations with other — with external actors, including non-Arab ones? How might their ideologies, organizations and programs be changing in light of the upheavals of the last year, in light of the electoral dynamics of recent months and in light of governing responsibilities that they may have to take on? What are the implications of all of this for American foreign policy makers? And, finally, what can we do to mitigate Arab Muslim anger at the United States and improve our relations with new leaders in the world of political Islam?
JOHN VOLL, professor, Georgetown University; associate director, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding
The Arab Spring moved the world from the desktop public sphere to the pocket public sphere, and a whole new mode of political dynamics. The transformation of political activism provided crucial support to the uprising in Cairo, for example. Wael Ghonim, the Google marketing executive who became one of the heroes of Tahrir Square, says that what is really important is not activism, but "engagism." The shift from hardcopy pamphleteering to desktop public sphere to pocket communication is a shift from ideologically based, party-organized activism into a kind of emotional engagement.
Of course, you still have to hand out pamphlets; you still need to knock on doors. You still need to do some of the old politicking. But you have a whole new mode of operation. It is impossible to imagine Tawakel Karman, the Nobel Prize-winning, Yemeni Arab Spring activist or engagist, a young woman in a hijab, being a global figure without our pocket public-sphere activism.
There is a second thing going on: the emergence of what I would call a nonideological ideology. In recalling an article that I wrote 30 years ago in this Council's journal (1983), I am reminded that we were also in the midst of a major transformation then, in terms of how one creates a narrative for participation, for opposition and for political advocacy.
In the Arab world, in the first half of the twentieth century, there was a great political narrative, nationalism and anti-imperialism, which was articulated by educated upper-middle-class and middle-class university-educated politicians. In Egypt, for example, you had the Wafd party of the 1920s with Saad Zaghloul, and later the Wafd party of Mustafa Nahhas in the 1930s and 1940s. Across the Arab world, you had a nationalist movement that was relatively secular and clearly middle class; it was not a major social revolution. At the end of World War II, that was the dominant narrative in the Arab world.
But, come 1952, you had the Egyptian "revolution," really a bloodless coup in which a bunch of young, idealistic military officers took control of the government. A new mode of political articulation of ideas and ideology and programs emerged: radical socialism. The dominant ideology was a sort of constructed radicalism embodied by Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Baath party as it emerged in Syria and then in Iraq, the Neo-Destour Party of Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia, the Istiqlal party of Allal al-Fassi and company in Morocco, and so on. It was a relatively radical vision of the need for social reform.
That kind of radicalism essentially failed. It became bureaucratic state capitalism. From that emerged a newly transformed political ideology that was highlighted by the Iranian Revolution and Ayatollah Khomeini. This "new" ideology of '81, '82, '83 got labeled "political Islam."
The political Islam of the 1980s was a specific political ideology, not a generic term, but a specific political ideology as articulated by people like Rashid Ghannouchi in Tunisia and the Islamic Tendency Movement, which became the Ennahda party; articulated by Hassan Turabi in Sudan with the development of the National Islamic Front; articulated elsewhere by people like Anwar Ibrahim and the ABIM Islamic youth movement in Malaysia and so on. You then had the third transformation, the movement from middle-class nationalism to the radical nationalism of the young officers to the political Islam of the 1980s and 1990s.
There are legacies of all of those in Arab politics. But what we have at the beginning of the twenty-first century is the emergence of a new mode of what we might think of as pragmatic operationalism, and it produced somebody like Wael Ghonim.
It's interesting to compare the faces and voices of the different personalities. The old image was Mustafa Nahas, a plump Egyptian in suit and tie and a fez in the 1920s and '30s. Then came handsome, young, idealistic Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser. You had to be a good-looking, earnest young man to be one of those keys for that visual imagery. Even Bashar Al-Asad's father Hafez had that sort of look for a while, as did Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qadhafi.
Even though people like Ghannouchi, Turabi and Anwar Ibrahim were coat-and-tie men who sometimes wore more traditional garb, the face of political Islam is the Ayatollah Khomeini, with his long gray beard and somber look.
The face today is that of a non-ideological geek, Wael Ghonim.
The new ideology is pragmatic and practical: get rid of the current regime and do social justice, get jobs for the newly educated and so on. There is very little ideology in the programs of the Arab Spring in Tunisia or Egypt, or even with Tawakel Karman in Yemen.
For those of us who studied ideology as graduate students and wrote books and articles on transforming it, the new revolution, the new public sphere, does not have a Thomas Paine "Common Sense" pamphlet. The new revolution has a soundtrack. The voice of the new revolution in many ways is the hip-hop rapper. Every country that had a major Arab Spring event has a blogger or a rapper. The real ideology in Egypt, for example, is in Essam's "Two-minute Song." The message is simple: "Erhal." Get out.
For much longer than my Beethoven-oriented musical tastes admit, "Erhal" becomes the message. Whether you're talking about El Haked in Morocco or El General in Tunisia or a whole host of heavy metal and rap people in Egypt, you have a new vernacular. In the old days, ideology was articulated in modern-standard Arabic. Now you have hip hop and rap that, even when they're talking in English, it is a little incomprehensible for people of my generation.
PETER MANDAVILLE, director, Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies, George Mason University
My remarks are going to focus primarily on Islamic/Islamist groups in Egypt. You can already hear in my hesitation on terminology an initial telegraphing of one of the key themes in my remarks. It is the idea that old categories that we've been comfortable with, and terminology that we use to apply to these groups, may perhaps no longer be that useful in capturing the reality of Islamic social and political space, amidst the upheaval that we've seen over the course of the last year.
I want to begin, however, by making a couple of remarks about some ways to think about the nature of these events more broadly, and then also to identify a couple of trends that seem to be at work, particularly within Islamic, Islamist, political-Islam-type space, which apply not just to Egypt, but to a number of other countries, not just in the Middle East but across the Muslim-majority world.
There has been a lot of debate in the aftermath of 2011 about whether these events should be best understood as driven by socioeconomic or structural factors. Should they be understood as a sort of cry for democracy and political pluralism? No doubt all of these factors were at work. But I've found it useful, when trying to capture what this was all about, to think of it as a set of events concerning populations who may have formally held the status of citizens but were never really citizens in a substantive sense — comprising particular relationships between the state and society, reciprocal duties and obligations, and so on. Populations were coming forward and demanding to be regarded as citizens in the true sense of that term, as people who would be treated by their governments with dignity such as people who hold certain kinds of rights.
I think this question of coming into citizenship becomes relevant for engaging the question of political Islam going forward. To my mind, one of the key problems that needs to be engaged is this: When movements, parties, groups with an Islamic reference, an Islamic character, Islamic roots come to the political fore, what questions need to be asked about their conception of citizenship? Who counts as a citizen? How can the full rights of all citizens in these countries, regardless of their religious, ethnic, gender or sexual orientation, be guaranteed?
One trend within Islamic social and political space more broadly in the region, and one of the key things that seems to be going on, is an intense pluralization of Islamic space. The number of actors and groups that are claiming this label to varying degrees and in various ways has been exploding. Certainly, over the course of the last year, but, arguably, even over the course of the last couple of decades — as these political systems open up — the number of actors and players that seek to relate their agenda, their activism, their work in the world to Islam is widening. And it's happening in places that we don't generally associate with Islamic social and political projects.
Of course, there have always been, for the last 80 years at least, Islamist parties. There have been religious institutions such as Al Azhar in Egypt. There has also been the rise over the last decade of figures such as Amr Khaled, a sort of televangelist-type, who doesn't have the formal credentials of a religious scholar and is not affiliated with the groups and parties that we recognize as political Islam. Rather, his background has been in management training and accounting. Yet he has done a tidy business and become, at the height of his popularity, a household name through a combination of elements of pop psychology and 12-step self-help programs overlaid with an Islamic veneer.
This is a sort of new modality of "doing" Islam in the world. The whole question of what doing Islam in the world looks like is changing. The terms "political Islam" or "Islamism" are not necessarily analytically useful anymore. I sometimes have difficulty recognizing what an Islamist is or what political Islam as an ideological project is.
This is the second kind of trend I want to point to. In the Academy for some years we've been working with the idea of what we call post-Islamism. The term finally appeared in The New York Times last year, so I guess it's hit the mainstream now. Have we entered a post-Islamist age? On the face of it, that's a counterintuitive point to raise because these Islamist groups are doing phenomenally well politically. They are sweeping the elections. How can we be in a post-Islamist period?
What those who are proponents of the post-Islamist thesis would put forward is the idea that, yes, these groups are politically prominent, but they're no longer ideologically distinctive. In order to render themselves politically palatable to a critical mass, they've had to purge from their political discourse and from their political praxis much of the Islamic content — what has made them ideologically distinctive has had to be shed in order to find mass acceptance.
On Egypt more specifically, one is wary of trying to say anything about Egypt right now, given the fluidity of the situation and the fact that, during any given 24-hour period, you can wake up the next morning and find things have changed significantly.
The headline last week announced that the Muslim Brotherhood, after having said for so long that they would not do so, named Khairat al-Shater as their official presidential candidate. And now, just in the last couple of days, we've had the significant event of Egypt's administrative court essentially putting an end to the activity of the assembly charged with writing a new constitution. It will be very important to see whether the supreme court in Egypt upholds that ruling.
This speaks directly, and in very important ways, to the tussle that has been in the making for some time between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), who over the last year have enjoyed something of a symbiotic marriage of convenience. It was clear that at some point the two were going to start to clash, and we're now starting to see it come to a head as we roll towards presidential elections and, presumably, some sort of handover to civilian rule.
I'm not going to get into the background and history of the Muslim Brotherhood. I assume that most of you know something about where it comes from. I want to raise the question of what is this thing? How should we think of it? As a broad-based social movement? Yes. As a political party? Yes, it has one of those now, too. But it's very difficult for us to think of the Brotherhood in a singular, monolithic, cohesive sense. It is riven with different factions and cleavages. In many ways, the Brotherhood today is a coalition of different projects and interests that are loosely held together by the label "Islamism" or the titular label "Muslim Brotherhood," but are not necessarily politically cohesive.
We've seen episodes of these cleavages, this internal fragmentation, increasingly playing out in public ways. At the time Mubarak fell from power last year, there was a very intense debate within the Brotherhood about whether it should set up a political party immediately or not. Would it be better for the Brotherhood to bide its time —not risk exposing itself politically but continuing to work primarily in the realm of society? Or should it go for broke and rush into this new, changing political opportunity structure and try to move forward? It's clear how that debate turned out.
Likewise, we've had a similar debate in the Brotherhood over the past weeks about the question of whether it should endorse and/or run its own presidential candidate. Much of this, I think, is at one level evidence of different camps within the Brotherhood, but also the fact that there's a lot of improvising going on. The political situation is very fluid now. I think that's why we see statements that were made at one time being reexamined in light of subsequent events.
What are these key divisions and camps within the Brotherhood? It's most common for people to speak of a division between generations, old Brotherhood guys and young Brotherhood guys. There's some truth to that, but it's not simply a matter of young and old. The idea is out there that the young ones are a little bit more liberal or open-minded, but the old guys are keeping to the ideological structures of the 1920s and the Hassan al-Banna vision.
That's not exactly true. You will find older Brotherhood leadership figures who are relatively pragmatic and liberal; likewise, you will find very young Brotherhood figures who are incredibly conservative in their orientation. Sometimes it has more to do with the position of the Brotherhood within Egyptian politics at the time that a given individual was socialized into the movement. Was it a time when the Brotherhood was being heavily oppressed, or was it a time when they had relatively wide latitude to operate? These are some of the operative effects. And you see rural and urban divides to some extent.
What is clear is that in terms of internal divisions breaking out into the open, we saw very clearly after the fall of Mubarak one of the youth segments of the Brotherhood formally leave. They cut themselves off and left the Brotherhood, setting up a rival political party called the Egyptian Current party. They basically threw their lot in with the revolutionary protest figures in Tahrir Square. These were the young guys who in the early days of the revolution on January 25, 26, 27 — remember, the Brotherhood itself didn't show up in Tahrir Square until January 28 — broke away, saying from day one, we need to be out there. This is our struggle. This is the Egyptian people's struggle, and it's ours.
The Brotherhood at that point was still very hesitant: could be dangerous to get involved; this whole thing might not work, and then if we're in the square, we're going to really get in trouble. So for the first three days of the revolution there was an official order within the Brotherhood that members of the movement should not join the protest. This youth group basically said, Forget that; we're in the square. They subsequently left to set up their own party.
This was not the only moment of tension. Tensions had been emerging for years. The broadening public sphere that's been made available through social media and Internet spaces. This younger generation that broke away is the blogger generation of the Brotherhood, if you will, young activists who had been running their own blogs for years. Moreover, these are blogs in which they would often quite openly discuss the Brotherhood's internal dirty laundry. They'd talk about different factions and rivalries and arguments going on within leadership circles. This was not something that the old guard of the movement appreciated; this has generally been a fairly closed movement where internal deliberation are not visible to the outside world.
What we have in the Brotherhood right now is a fairly complex three-way dance. They're trying to maintain certain kinds of credibility with the street, with the population at large and, certainly last year, with the protesters and activists who were the core energy of the revolution itself. They were trying to maintain and prove their revolutionary credentials at the same time as they're trying to maintain good relations with the SCAF. It saw this manifested in events such as the run-up last November to the elections, when there were a number of protests called to express discontent about some of the policies the SCAF had been following with respect to detentions, the use of military trials for civilians and such. There, once again, the Brotherhood told its people not to join those protests. Now in the post-election period, you have this complex relationship with the salafi parties to manage.
This, again, is a manifestation of the pluralization of the public sphere, where the Brotherhood very early on, when the salafis did so well, was very keen to say, We're not them; just because we have this Islam thing in common, don't think that we're the same. I remember being in meetings where Brotherhood and salafi figures were sitting across the table from each other, and the Brotherhood guy turned to the salafi and said, "If you want to coalition with us based on public health and economic growth issues, we're all for that. But if you want to coalition with us based on Sharia, we're not interested in playing that game."
But what you see now is another dimension of that competition, a kind of politics of holier-than-thou. Who's the real representative of Islam in the political sphere? So you see the Brotherhood starting to reinitiate the debate that began back in 2007, when it leaked its first draft political-party platform, the debate about whether Egypt needs something like a council of religious scholars that would look at all of the legislation that comes out of the parliament and pronounce upon whether those laws conform to Sharia or not. These are some of the ways that they're having to square this issue with the salafis.
Let me wind down my remarks by talking a bit about the salafis. Their phenomenal rise is probably the political development that has caught most observers by surprise. They're also the least understood of the major political actors on the scene in the Middle East now. Of course, we think of them most in relation to Egypt given the amazing success of the al-Nour party, but we see salafis elsewhere in North Africa. They've been part of the woodwork, if you will, of Islamic space in the Middle East for decades. These are groups that are ultra-conservative theologically but have historically been apolitical. They've not been prone to involvement or engagement in politics. Politics is considered sort of impure space; you wouldn't want to bring the purity of religion into the messy, political fray.
In Egypt, salafis have been present, you could make the case, in one form or another, for centuries. But the modern salafi movement has been present since the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. There have been salafi institutions in Egypt since the 1920s. And, while their political success has certainly been surprising, people who have been watching the salafi space in Egypt over the last decade were not really that surprised. There are four factors that we have to look at to understand what's driving this phenomenal salafi success.
First is the fact that since about 2005, you've had the emergence in Egypt of a distinctly salafi public sphere, to invoke the public-sphere notion that John mentioned. And there is a set of satellite TV channels, funded largely by the Saudis, whose content 24/7 is salafi religious programs. You have a number of superstar salafi figures who have become household names through their positions on those channels, a media space that was distinctly salafi.
You also had in the run-up to the fall of Mubarak the Egyptian regime itself giving the salafis a bit of space to operate politically, actually patting them on the back and pushing them into that space, precisely so that they would act as a counterweight to the Brotherhood. This looks remarkably like what Israel was doing in the run-up to the Intifada, actually encouraging Hamas so that it would be a rival force against Fatah. It then simply took on a life of its own.
Likewise, the Egyptian regime was encouraging salafis, and once those chinks were open, this thing snowballed very quickly. What's allowing it to snowball, I think, is a combination of financial support coming out of a number of countries in the Gulf, but also the fact that the salafis have been able to capitalize on the fact that they are new political players. They are the fresh face of Islam. The Muslim Brotherhood are incumbents; they've been there for so long that their place in society had become kind of institutionalized. Although they had been serving as an opposition force, they were actually pretty well integrated. They're not new actors. The salafis, by contrast, have been able to say, If you want something new after this revolution, and if you want to shop Islamic in political terms, we're the people who are both new and not tainted by whatever compromises the Brotherhood has had to make with the regime in order to be able to continue to operate. We need to make a distinction between those salafi groups that have formed political parties and are in the formal political process, who will be subject to some of the conventional forms of political pressure that can be applied, and salafi groups that operate at the level of society and are less easily influenced.
In addition to the salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood, it's worthwhile pointing out that there have been a number of efforts to create cross-ideological spaces of political discourse in Egypt that will allow liberals, leftists and Islamists of various sorts to come together to work out what a national agenda of priorities might look like. I don't want to overplay this. It's not been that politically influential, but such spaces do exist. I think the new al-Adl party that was formed after the revolution is interesting to watch in this regard. Its founder, Mustafa Al-Naggar, has played an interesting and sometimes pivotal role in the proceedings of the new parliament. The Al-Adl party also has a set of think-tanky, cultural-dialogue spaces around it, where conversations have taken place that have fed into some of the ideas around constitution drafting.
I was in government at the time that this all was going down and was specifically focused on the question of U.S. policy towards Islamists. Let me close with just one thought that presented itself to me after several months of working this portfolio in the State Department. The U.S. domestic conversation about this issue was as important for getting our policy right as what we actually chose to do in Egypt. I'm speaking here of what I take to be a need to reconfigure the conversation on political Islam on Capitol Hill and in the broader public discussion at large. To my mind, it tends to be rather polarized. Either you have people saying that groups like the Muslim Brotherhood are pretty much the same as Hamas or just a bit different. They have concerns about the Brotherhood that are associated with broader regional-security issues, terrorism and such. On the other hand, you have people saying, no, no, they're fine, they're democrats; they've evolved; they've changed; they're committed to democracy. Neither of these two poles is that helpful. There are issues and questions that need to be raised about these groups, but we need to recalibrate the conversation so that it's actually focusing on the questions we need to be worried about. To my mind, these are really questions ultimately about commitment to human rights and to political pluralism.
STEVEN KULL, director, Program on International Policy Attitudes; senior research scholar, University of Maryland
Most of the people you're hearing from today have been talking in terms of the dynamics of groups and institutions. I'm a psychologist, so I'm going to be talking more about the forces within individuals, the tensions that individuals feel. I'm going to try to answer the question of what happened in Egypt and Tunisia, especially Egypt. Initially we saw these demonstrations that made some of us think Jeffersonian democracy was breaking out in the Middle East. But then there were the results of the parliamentary election and we saw the ascendance of Islamist parties — enough that one could wonder whether Egypt was on its way to becoming like Iran. Are others going to follow in their wake?
The answer I'm going to offer is that there is, within most Muslims and in the Middle East, of course, a kind of inner clash of civilizations. There is an attraction to liberal democratic values, and there are Islamist aspirations. The key thing that we need to remember is that neither of these is going to go away. Both of them are going to be present. Both are strong forces within the majority of Muslims. This is based on polls that have been done before and after the Arab Spring and also on focus groups that I've done throughout the region.
Let me give you a few examples of the kinds of numbers you see in polls on these questions. On whether a democratic political system is a good way of governing our own country, 83 percent of Egyptians say it is, as do 90 percent of Moroccans, 88 percent of Kuwaitis, 81 percent of Jordanians, 85 percent of Palestinians, 76 percent of Iraqis. Large majorities in Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Morocco agree that democracy may have its problems, but it is better than any other form of government.
Here's one statement that I think is particularly interesting: "The will of the people should be the basis of the authority of government." Large numbers of Muslims agree with that, including 98 percent of Egyptians as well as 67 percent of Iranians. What's particularly interesting is that it is somewhat contrary to the principle that Islam or Sharia should be the basis of the authority of government.
Pew asked a question in which they put in front of respondents the argument that democracy is a Western way of doing things that would not work here, versus the argument that democracy is not just for the West and can work well here. Large majorities rejected the view that it is simply a Western way of doing things and said that democracy could work here, including among Kuwaitis, Lebanese, Jordanians, Palestinians, Egyptians, Moroccans and so on.
You also find that throughout the Middle East there's very strong support for liberal principles related to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and so on. So, one begins to think that the whole Jeffersonian image is just starting to solidify, and that they're all on their way to becoming like European countries.
But then there is a whole set of poll results that show strong support for Islamist principles. The idea that Islam should play a central role in government is endorsed by 92 percent of Egyptians. Eighty-five percent of Egyptians say that it should be the official religion of their country. Even when presented with the counterargument that our government should not make Islam the official religion, because this would be unfair to citizens of Egypt who are not Muslim, 57 percent of Egyptians say, No, it should be the official religion.
Then there's the question of Sharia. In a poll we presented a number of goals of al-Qaeda and asked how they felt about those goals. No, al-Qaeda's not popular, but if asked about al-Qaeda's goal to require a strict application of Sharia law in every country, 71 percent of Egyptians and 76 percent of Moroccans endorsed that goal. Fifty-seven percent of Egyptians said that Sharia should play a larger role than it does today in Egypt.
There was even one poll that Arab Barometer did where they first presented the statement that the government should implement only the laws of Sharia. Large majorities agreed: 86 percent in Morocco, 80 percent in Jordan, 80 percent in Algeria, 77 percent in Kuwait, 55 percent of the Palestinians. Then in the same poll, they presented the statement that the government and parliament should make laws according to the wishes of the people. Eighty-two percent of Moroccans agreed, 62 percent of Kuwaitis, 59 percent of Algerians, Jordanians, Palestinians and so on. Clearly, there is some tension here.
Another example surrounds the issue of vetting laws that Peter mentioned, an idea that the Muslim Brotherhood has put forward: there should be a council of religious scholars who have the power to overturn laws that it believes are contrary to the Quran. The Muslim Brotherhood put this forward, but then, even before the Arab Spring, backed away from it. But it's still there in the background. So, presented with the argument that there should be a body of senior religious scholars with the power to overturn laws it believes are contrary to the Quran — as opposed to the liberal position that, if laws are passed by democratically elected officials and are consistent with the constitution, they should not be subject to a veto by religious scholars — majorities endorsed the Islamist position: 75 percent in Egypt, 63 percent in Iraq, 62 percent in Iran, 59 percent of Palestinians.
But at the same time, when presented with the statement that men of religion should have no influence over the decisions of government, majorities agreed with that in Morocco and among Palestinians, as well as a plurality in Algeria. But majorities did disagree in Kuwait, and views were divided in Jordan. The statement "religion is a matter of personal faith and should be kept separate from government policy" does get majority agreement in Lebanon, Turkey, Kuwait and Morocco. In Jordan, a slight majority disagree, and Egyptians are divided.
What you see here are real tensions. Obviously, substantial numbers of people agree with both liberal positions and Islamist positions. It's an internal conflict. And there is a rejection of al-Qaeda and its pure Islamist model. That is not popular. At the same time, Muslims do want to preserve the Islamic foundations of their society. They believe that Islam has served them well, and it is a source of pride. It is their most fundamental identity, more fundamental than their national identity. And they want Sharia to play a role. They want a quality of piety in their culture. The liberal model is not that religion should play no role, but that religion should be a private experience, while the Islamic model is that it should be part of the public sphere. Most Muslims endorse the idea that Islam should play some role in the public sphere.
There's one other force operating in the Middle East that we need to track to some extent: there is still some attraction to authoritarianism. Asked if they would prefer a democratic form of government or a leader with a strong hand, most say that they favor a democratic form of government: 65 percent in Kuwait, 52 percent in Jordan — not that many. A majority of Palestinians favored a strong leader, and Egyptians were divided. This is before the Arab Spring. So you need to keep in mind that there is some attraction to the authoritarian system, particularly when things get unstable.
How is all this playing out in the present environment? First of all, the Arab Spring as a phenomenon is generally seen as a positive thing. The Arab Center for Research and Politics polled 12 Arab countries. Overall, 70 percent said they support the revolutions, and two-thirds said they support democracy and reject the position against democracy based on the attraction of stability and security. In Egypt, Gallup did some polling in the fall and found a quite positive attitude about the Arab Spring. Seventy-nine percent said that Mubarak's resigning had improved Egypt's status in the world. They reject the idea that this change is due to foreign influences. Interestingly, too, majorities support the protesters against Asad in Syria. They have expressed eagerness for elections to move forward — 87 percent. And 89 percent believe that parliamentary elections would be fair.
This sounds pretty optimistic. But, at the same time, more modest numbers say that their own situation has improved as a result of the Arab Spring: in Egypt 47 percent said that it had improved, 16 percent that it's gotten worse; about 35 percent said it had no impact. In Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, almost half in every case said that it has improved. In Jordan, only 18 percent say the Arab Spring has improved things for them; 25 percent say it's made it worse, 58 percent say there's been no impact. The Lebanese are divided on the question as well.
At the same time, when you look at how Egyptians are feeling about the future, there's a lot of optimism. Asked whether they're going to be better off in five years, 85 percent of Egyptians expressed optimism. In 2009, when the same question was asked, only 39 percent expressed optimism. That's a really significant change. Things are also up significantly in Morocco, with substantial optimism, and also in Saudi Arabia — but not in Jordan or Lebanon.
Support for freedom of expression is very, very high. At the same time, you still see support for Islamist forces. Asked whether laws should strictly follow the Quran, 62 percent in Egypt agreed, as did 70 percent in Jordan and 36 percent in Lebanon. And, of course, you see a huge increase in support for the Muslim Brotherhood. In August, support was only 17 percent, while in December it was 48 percent. There was also a major upward movement in support for the Salafist Nour party.
This brings me to a key point that Peter was alluding to, that the Muslim Brotherhood and Ennahda in Tunisia have basically taken over a new space: they are presenting themselves as the middle ground. We tend to look at them as the Islamists, conflating the Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood into a unitary actor. But I don't think that is how most Egyptians see it. The Ennahda party and the Brotherhood are working really hard to not be associated with the Salafists. Ennahda has actually come out and said, We don't have to have it in the constitution that Sharia is the basis of law. This is a rather radical shift for them to make. So you have this effort on their part to create a kind of middle ground, and I think they're playing their hand quite well. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt have the Salafists on their right, whom they are now distinguishing themselves from, and they're making many affirmations of liberal principle. They also have tried, until recently, to have good relations with the military, to create a sense of continuity.
By the way, the military continues to be popular. There's confidence in the military. Some of these numbers might surprise you. In Egypt, there is confidence that the military will hand over power.
So the Muslim Brotherhood has played its hand well. But the relationship between it and the military is fraying now. The military seems to be hesitant to relinquish control. It is unclear just how the Muslim Brotherhood is going to maneuver among the military, the Salafists and the secularists. It's a real question, too, whether the Muslim Brotherhood is going to raise again the idea of having a body of religious scholars review the laws.
I want to spend just a few minutes in closing on relations with the United States. Views of the United States in the Middle East continue to be quite negative. After Obama was elected, international opinion of the United States improved dramatically — except in the Middle East and Pakistan. Very large majorities have unfavorable views of the United States there now, with the exception of Lebanon. The perception is that relations with the West are bad. A plurality in Egypt and a majority in Jordan and Lebanon believe that their government cooperates too much with Washington.
In terms of the Arab Spring, the United States is seen as having been behind the curve. They just tried to get out in front of the parade once it was inevitable. Seventy-three percent in Egypt say that the United States is not serious about promoting democracy in the region. Seventy-one percent oppose economic aid from the United States, and 74 percent oppose U.S. aid to Egyptian civil-society groups. So in this move on the part of the Egyptian government to go after the IRI and NDI, they were playing to the crowd. This is not something they were doing despite the crowd.
So let me just briefly put what is going on now in the context of views about the United States. Views of the United States, which is what I talk about in my book, are driven by what I call a narrative of betrayal. There is an attraction to much that's associated with the United States: democracy, human rights and international law. Religious tolerance is another key one. So it's complex. It's not as simple as that people in the Middle East have a negative feeling. They are drawn to a lot about America.
But then there's the perception that the United States doesn't abide by those principles and is fundamentally driven by hostility toward Islam. This is widely believed. There is a widespread perception that the United States is determined to break down Islam. America is perceived saying that it is fine for people to go to the mosque when they want to, but the idea that Islam would be in the public sphere is perceived as something the United States is hostile to and trying to break down through promoting liberalism. The presence of U.S. military forces in the region is seen as part of this effort. There is a perception that the United States has a kind of gun to the head of the Muslim world and is saying, "Back away from Islam and accept our secular model of how society should be organized."
When the United States is perceived as in any way trying to intervene in their society, they're quite suspicious of it. And it produces an effect that's contrary to whatever the United States would like. If the Unites States is perceived as trying to promote secular principles, this creates a counterreaction: I'd better hold tightly to my Islamic identity; I need to dig in my heels, because there is a threat. This gets generalized to all kinds of things — cultural products, television — that people are drawn to, and then they say to themselves, wait a minute; I'm being polluted by these forces.
The intensity of feeling toward the United States is hard for us to comprehend. The United States is so pervasive in their lives and it affects them in so many ways. This term "the Great Satan" — I used to think it was just an epithet. In fact, it describes something they experience like a cosmic force, because the United States is so powerful.
At the same time, the United States is very much associated with the changes that have come with globalization and modernity, many of which they are drawn to. But they don't want to be overwhelmed by them. So you see this kind of love/hate, attraction/fear relationship. They want to move toward it, yet are afraid it's going to overwhelm them. They have a feeling that the principles that are guiding the United States are great, but then it lets them down by not living up to them and being domineering. Thus they have a feeling of being betrayed, which is the title of my book [Feeling Betrayed: The Roots of Muslim Anger at America]. Whenever I was leading focus groups, there would be a sort of beseeching tone: Can't you go back to Washington and get people to remember their higher values that we so much respect?
What can the United States do? I'm not going to be able to fully take on this broad question, though I do address it in the book. A key thing is that the United States needs to embrace the idea that Islam is going to be part of these societies. The United States needs to take a friendlier posture toward moderate Islamist parties and make a distinction between those that are willing to work democratically and those radical Islamists that are trying to use force to achieve their goals.
If the society were fundamentally divided into groups — people who are strongly secular and people who are strongly Islamist — you could say, let's aid the secularists and they will get stronger and convince the uncertain ones. But since the division is largely within individuals — as we can see by having these large majorities expressing seemingly contradictory positions — then anything you do to promote one side produces a reaction on the other side within the same person. It creates a polarizing reaction. So any effort on the part of the United States to pick a winner and promote it is going to backfire. It's so hard for America to not act, but here the Zen principle of nonaction might be wise.
Another key point is that any departure from America's liberal principles related to the use of force is very costly. It produces a reaction of betrayal. Any use of military force in the region also needs to be viewed as being very costly. It elicits an image of the United States as putting a gun to their head and trying to impose on them the secular model. This drives them closer to the Islamic side of the equation and knocks out of balance their own process of integrating the forces of liberalism and Islamism.
Muslims understand that this process of integration is a challenge, and there are a lot of thoughtful people who are working on it. The Muslim Brotherhood understands that and is trying in some way to offer a model. Ultimately the United States needs to align itself with that process of integration, rather than to choose one side over the other.
ALEXIS ARIEFF, analyst, Congressional Research Service
I'm going to focus my remarks on the Maghreb region of North Africa, historically considered to be at the fringe of the Arab world. But in many ways its experience has presaged wider dynamics in the region, indicating some truth to the analytic concept of an Arab world and clearly demonstrating that populations in the central Middle East are also watching what goes on in these countries. Of course, the Arab Spring started in Tunisia, but Algeria's experience with free-range political liberalization in the late 1980s, culminating in the 1992 military coup that prevented the Islamic Salvation Front from winning legislative elections, continues to be a touchstone of debate among analysts and elites throughout the region. Questions about the legitimacy of restrictions on democracy, about the use of violence against authoritarian regimes and other debates remain quite relevant for the region today.
The international community today is closely watching Egypt and Syria, but it's worth examining Tunisia, Morocco and even Algeria as examples of what might be shaping up as an emerging regional order, albeit one that is shaky and prone to vast divergences among countries and cases. Much attention has been paid to power struggles between Islamists and secularists over the shape of emerging political orders and political systems within transitional countries in particular. This dynamic is particularly notable in Tunisia, which has a long history of liberal secularism, and where the ban on Islamist groups under the former regime of President Ben-Ali was most exhaustively maintained.
However, I think less attention to date has been paid to dynamics of competition within and among emergent Islamist groups. I use "Islamist" because it's a convenient term though I agree with what's been said about the analytic usefulness of this concept. In fact, these parties do not refer to themselves as Islamist groups, so we should wonder what we should be calling them and how to deal with this. In any case, after a brief overview of where we are today in Tunisia and Morocco, I'm going to speak to these emerging dynamics within and among Islamist organizations.
With regard to Tunisia, the results of the Constituent Assembly elections in October 2011 confirmed the rise of the moderate Islamist party Ennahda, which was founded in the early 1980s by Rachid Ghannouchi and Abdel Fattah Mourou. Ennahda won a strong plurality of seats, about 41 percent. Their share of the vote was more than that of the next eight parties combined — almost every other party that won more than one seat. Ennahda has formed a coalition with two center-left secular parties whose own strong electoral performance, compared to that of more stringently secular parties, seemed partly to stem from the fact that each had signaled a willingness to work with the Islamists.
As Tunisia seeks to remake its political system and find a new consensus among elites about the rules of the political game, Ennahda has, therefore, found itself at the center of emerging debates over religion, state and identity. Ennahda leaders portray themselves as moderates who espouse democratic participation, support the separation of religion and state, oppose religious extremism, and seek to preserve, and even expand women's freedoms.
A major test of these promises came to pass recently with the debate within the party over whether to reference Sharia in the constitutional draft. And, indeed, the party decided in the end to overrule its own parliamentarians and not refer to Sharia. Secularist detractors accuse the party, however, of a double discourse, of displaying moderation in order to enter government but with the intention of gradually introducing more restrictive laws and institutions. Whether those fears are borne out has yet to be seen.
In Morocco, unlike in Tunisia, the political system has largely remained in place. A new constitution adopted in 2011, amid a surge in domestic protests led by a youth group calling itself the February 20th Movement, does not represent a radical shift in Moroccan politics. Instead it upholds the monarchy's preeminent role in political decision making. However, it might provide a basis for greater power sharing, negotiated among elites between the monarchy and elected officials.
The moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD), also known as Al-Misbah (The Beacon), won a plurality of seats in early legislative elections in November and is currently leading the government for the first time in a coalition with nationalist and leftist parties. Unlike in Tunisia, the boundaries of the PJD's authority are more restricted due to the monarchy's continued role. Some analysts view the PJD as unlikely to enact significant political change, as the party's leaders have long been primarily concerned with garnering acceptance from the monarchy in exchange for integration into the political system. In addition to its support for the monarchy, the PJD has tried to reassure secularists by indicating that it will not seek to impose strict Islamic codes of behavior or other contentious social issues. At the same time, as a constituent-driven party, unlike a lot of political parties in Morocco, the PJD may have electoral incentives to challenge the monarchy, if mostly behind closed doors, over issues such as authority over state appointments, oversight of the economy and the fight against corruption.
So in both countries, Islamist parties have found themselves at the helm of government in a time of political uncertainty and great economic hardship. They're also contending with a new form of political debate and an emerging political sphere that was described by John that involves a new dynamic of popular oversight of public administration, which did not previously exist. In the case of Tunisia, Ennahda wasn't even able to exist within Tunisia at all for nearly two decades. The leadership was either in prison or abroad. In the case of Morocco, the PJD has had more time within the system, albeit in the opposition, to forge shared policy positions within the party, but is still finding its way within this new role.
In both cases, organizations that initially evolved under stringent restrictions as social and religious movements primarily are now undergoing a potentially difficult transition from movements into political parties subject to pragmatic considerations, compromise and blame when things go wrong. The PJD has been undergoing this transition for some time, as has Ennahda's exiled leadership, but this is not necessarily true of the grassroots. They're grappling with the pragmatic imperatives that have been described by other panelists, as well as perhaps the "post-Islamist" phenomenon mentioned by Peter. These parties are therefore now coping with internal divisions over policy issues such as the role of Sharia, but also potentially among individuals with different personal backgrounds. There are potential rivalries between those who were in prison and those who were in exile, between generations, between those who were longtime movement activists and those who have joined the movement now that they are a viable party, and so forth. There are challenges as well from more conservative Islamist movements, including salafi groups that are flexing their muscles in both countries.
In Tunisia, there's been much attention to salafist intimidation of secularist activists, artists and university professors. This might present an opportunity for Ennahda to portray itself as relatively moderate and to demonstrate that it diverges from these organizations ideologically. On the other hand, it's also highly problematic for Ennahda, and I think Ennahda leaders recognize this quite clearly.
It appears in fact, from the point of view of salafis, that their efforts to agitate the public space and influence discussion about policy is aimed at least as much at forcing Ennahda to make tough decisions — between placating secularists and international partners versus, potentially, retaining credibility among more conservative population segments. This dynamic has contributed to greater polarization between Islamists and secularists by moving the policy conversation considerably to the right of where Ennahda would have preferred to keep it, toward a considerably more conservative interpretation. It has further undermined trust among Tunisian elites over the best response to the sometimes violent salafi agitation and threats to secularist actors.
Some salafi groups in Tunisia have attempted to register as political parties. To date, they remain banned from doing so under a political-parties law adopted under the 2011 interim government. Others appear to be trying to influence the system through popular mobilization without actually joining the political sphere as legal actors. Others, like salafist groups elsewhere in the region, continue to opt out of politics entirely and concern themselves with personal behavior.
Ennahda's approach has been focused on negotiation with salafi groups. Party leaders say that they want to avoid antagonizing salafis, who were oppressed for so long under previous regimes, so as to eventually tame them and bring them into the system. In describing this approach, Ennahda makes a distinction between terrorist actors who might be prone to violence and are not interested in legal political competition, and the more numerous salafi groups that are holding demonstrations and are, at times, threatening. These groups are also to be distinguished ideologically.
What form this salafi integration will ultimately take is very uncertain, as is the timeline. And the status of the political-parties law is, in fact, ambiguous. It was adopted by a political-reforms commission after Ennahda left that body and declined to participate in drafting the law. So in a way there's legal ambiguity concerning the grounds for legalizing a party. Ennahda leaders say that they want to review the law and then submit it to parliamentary approval in the assembly. The timeline and status of that review are unclear.
There's also ambiguity over the existence and mandate of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, an institution that stems from a French secularist concept of the role of the state in regulating religious space and practice. It was continued as an institution under Bourguiba and Ben Ali and still exists today. I think there are debates within Ennahda over the legitimacy of such an institution, and its future is uncertain.
The future of the party itself is very much in question. Rachid Ghannouchi has said that he will step down soon as Ennahda's president, although when, precisely, has not been specified. He currently holds no formal position in government but plays a major role in shaping policy positions within the party ahead of its first congress inside Tunisia in decades, which has been repeatedly delayed. It's unclear who will lead the party after he is gone, particularly in the run-up to national elections, currently expected to take place in early 2013.
In Morocco, the PJD is struggling to assert its political influence within the government. It is primarily focused on the dynamic between the party and the government coalition, on the one hand, and the monarchy, on the other. At the same time, it is warily watching groups such as Al Adl wal Ihssane, the Justice and Charity Organization, a massive grassroots Islamist movement led by the charismatic Sheik Abdessalam Yassine. Unlike the PJD, Yassine does not recognize the legitimacy of the Moroccan monarchy. Therefore, his movement is formally banned from politics. Not that he has necessarily sought to formally participate in politics, although the movement is tolerated and often flexes its muscles through street demonstrations.
The Justice and Charity Organization played a key role in orchestrating turnout for the leftist, secularist-led February 20th movement in 2011, an interesting case of strange bedfellows that we have yet to see elsewhere, to the same extent, in the region. While Yassine generally calls for boycotting elections, the PJD has likely benefited from votes by individual adherents to his movement. In January, after formally breaking with the February 20th movement, Yassine publicly lashed out at the PJD, essentially accusing them in an open letter of being palace lackeys. Each organization might see the other as a threat to its popular legitimacy. At the same time, the PJD's electoral success is likely sparking debates within the Justice and Charity Organization on whether to participate more formally in the political system and what such a decision would entail in terms of compromise with the regime.
PJD leaders may also be watching developments among Morocco's salafi community. The king has appeared to grant greater space to salafist political actors over the past year, for example, granting royal pardons to dozens of salafists who had been jailed in connection with the 2003 Casablanca bombings and other incidents. A well-known salafist leader, Mohamed Fizazi, who was released from prison last year, has made statements recently, including from prison, showing an increasing interest in participating in some way in a democratic system. He recently indicated he might form a political party.
In a rapidly changing region, competition within and among these Islamist groups could be equally, if not more, influential in determining the political path taken by, and the future shape of, Maghreb societies. In some ways, Algeria is already experiencing this, albeit in a very Algerian context, where politics have long been characterized by factionalism and, since the mid-1990s, by efforts to divide and co-opt certain Islamist movements. Today's political competition, ahead of legislative elections scheduled to take place next month, features much jostling for position between long-standing Islamist parties, such as the Movement for a Peaceful Society (MSP) — which has historical links to the Muslim Brotherhood and which participated in the government, to varying degrees, from the mid-'90s until earlier this year — and a significant array of newly created Islamist parties.
In addition to emergent Islamist groups, it's worth asking about the future role of youth movements and how they might recalibrate strategies to deal with this new political reality. Urban youth groups, of course, played a decisive role in protest movements in Morocco and Tunisia, but their cohesiveness and ability to put forward a shared political vision have faltered over the past year. Will we see other outsider coalitions between secularist student groups and grassroots Islamist movements, as we did in Morocco? This is something we should be watching.
Q & A
DR. MATTAIR: I would like to ask John Voll the first question: If we have a transition to something called emotional engagism and the use of new technology, how relevant is that when you move into the cycle of elections and contests for power between winning parties and entrenched institutions? Where is Wael Ghonim now, and how much do the people who came into the streets first have to say about what's going to happen now in any of these countries?
DR. VOLL: This points to a very important part of the dynamic of the contemporary public political sphere: The new emotional engagism, the social-media flash mobs, if you will, do not have the kind of organization that is needed for twentieth-century elections. This is one of the dynamics of the last six months, in Egypt in particular. The old-style politics is well-organized enough to win old-style elections. At the same time, you have the new mode. However much people like hip-hop, rappers don't go out and get actual hard-copy votes.
One of the important competitions is the one between the new mode of participation and the old. No political party in the old institutional mode can survive for long if it doesn't make some kind of effective adaptation to the other half of the political sphere. This is the battle between Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh and some of the younger people in the Brotherhood, the splits that Peter was talking about. Winning an election no longer means winning the street.
Q: On the issue of leadership in the context of these cyber revolutions, putting your life on the line is not quite the same as following somebody on Twitter. In fact, one of the stupidest things Mubarak may have done was to cut off the Internet. Many of these kids were quite happy sitting behind their computers playing revolution, but when the Internet was cut they went out into the street, where it really matters. So we may be exaggerating the role of the tools. Many critical elements are the enduring ideas and so forth.
Second, we talk about how many of these movements are less ideological, but we haven't, deep down, shed the Cold War, "John Wayne" approach. This was reflected in the International Republican Institute (IRI) incident: We're going to go there and we're going to teach them. A more mature approach might have been better: Where we're going to learn from each other and maybe invite Egyptians to teach us about their democracy and movement building and so forth. This might have countered the negative perceptions, which in some way are rooted in reality.
I don't know what the credentials are of the son of the secretary of transportation (Ray Lahood). The whole realm of so-called democracy promotion should be brought up for serious review.
DR. MANDAVILLE: On the question of the role of social media, I agree with you completely; the idea that these were Twitter revolutions is heavily overblown. That said, I think you can point to particular moments when these technologies played a pivotal role in putting out onto the street enough Egyptians to prompt a broader population that was hesitant to come out. These were people who had no access to the Internet, but started to see a critical mass stop fearing the security apparatus. I think that was absolutely crucial. In the case of Tunisia, I think it was when the regime imposed a media blackout on the demonstrations. And certain activist figures on social media were key in getting the eyes of the international media focused on Tunisia, which means that these technologies are relevant. But if you're trying to understand what caused these events to happen, the decisions made by the military leadership of both Tunisia and Egypt were pivotal in deciding which way these events went.
I share your concerns with respect to the way U.S. democracy promotion plays out sometimes, particularly with regard to some of the partners that these organizations choose to work with. This is something that Egyptians would complain to the U.S. government about consistently — not the fact that U.S. democracy assistance was present in Egypt, but that the United States was willing to work with groups known to be heavily tied, in nepotistic ways, to the ruling regime. It was a simulation of democracy promotion, a sham, a game.
With respect to what groups like NDI (National Democratic Institute) and IRI were doing in the aftermath of the revolution, however, I think it's fair to say that these groups understood themselves to be trying to provide basic skills and know-how to a whole new set of political actors. These people were saying, We want to be engaged and involved, but we don't know the first thing about running a political campaign. So NDI and IRI's programs weren't there to promote the values of liberal democracy. They were there to teach people and connect them to other regional mentors who could help them do very practical things like mounting a fundraising campaign and getting out the vote. I do share some of your concerns, but I think there's another side to it as well.
DR. KULL: There was a congressional stipulation that no aid or education should go to the Muslim Brotherhood, which was a real problem, and it was sending a really problematic signal. That whole posture seems to have changed. I think the reception of the Muslim Brotherhood delegation last week was a really important step. But the idea that we could go in and promote democracy selectively was really quite misguided.
DR. VOLL: Because of my generation, I tend to agree with the thought that one may be exaggerating the role of the tools of social media. But what I think of as a tool of communication is a mode of thinking. It isn't a matter of exaggerating a particular tool while people are still thinking in the old way. The younger generation who are participating in the electronic public sphere are thinking in different ways as well, even in terms of how they compose the words they use for making a political statement.
Q: Dr. Voll, I was wondering what your thoughts might be on what I've heard from some people from the Internet, and from some protesters as well: that they really want this to be a faceless movement, a movement for all Egyptians, all Syrians. They don't necessarily want to have a Martin Luther King-type figure spearheading it.
Professor Mandaville, in terms of the Muslim Brotherhood, I wonder if you would talk about how they might be forced to become more moderate by virtue of being in power now.
Dr. Kull, I think Samuel Huntington's concept of a "clash of civilizations" is very controversial. Do you feel that some of your research might treat Islam as kind of a monolith and not necessarily respect its different variations? There are variations and interpretations, even of Sharia law.
Lastly, do you think one possible explanation for the desire of people for both more Islamic or a pro-Islam-type reform and more democratic reform is the fear of a tyranny of the majority? If people see themselves as Muslim, it makes perfect sense that they would also want Islamic law.
DR. VOLL: My experience is the same as yours: an aggregate community has a sort of networked identity rather than a politically defined identity. The subtitle of Wael Ghonim's book is "The power of the people is greater than the people in power." "The people" is a nonideological, pragmatic operational term.
DR. MANDAVILLE: The Brotherhood has a dilemma now. It's easy to talk smack about the regime and explain how everything they're doing is wrong and that Islam is the solution for this and that. But now they're in power now. The idea dawns on them, how do we prove that Islam is the solution? When you look at a lot of their answers in the realm of economics, you're tempted to say, where's the Islam in that? It sounds a lot like entrepreneurship promotion and creating business-friendly environments. Well, these things are in tune with Islam, et cetera, et cetera. I think this question was at the heart of the debate within the Brotherhood about whether they should expose themselves politically by creating a party and rushing into this space. They decided to do so. My sense is that there are a good number of senior leaders in the movement who are genuinely committed to providing pragmatic, practical solutions to problems and will figure out how to explain them to the base in terms of Islam.
There lingers, however, the temptation — and this is what I fear — that if this doesn't work out well and the Brotherhood needs to be able to offer something to cling to, there will be a lot of temptation to turn back to that core constituency and engage in a lot of sloganeering and finger pointing about how the real problem is that people aren't being Islamic enough. That's when the salafi factor becomes operative.
I can't resist saying something briefly about the question of levels of support expressed for Sharia in opinion polls, because I have also observed this as well. If you understand Sharia to be an objective set of written laws that could just be plunked down into the statute books of a given country, there is indeed a contradiction between saying one wants that and saying one wants laws made by the citizens. If, however, as I suspect, many Muslims take a question about Sharia to be a mom-and-apple-pie question about wanting their country to be ruled according to morality, justice and rule of law, it's not at all difficult to explain why people express very high levels of support for Sharia.
DR. KULL: On the question of the clash of the civilizations, I didn't mean to in any way endorse this concept. I was describing an inner clash of civilizations, which is an apparent tension many Muslims feel between Islamic tradition and modernity and the adoption of liberal principles. I did provide numbers for specific countries, so I wasn't just making sweeping generalizations. There are even more of them in my book; if you want differentiation, there's a lot of it there. But I did find that throughout the Muslim world, not just in the Arab world, this is a recurring theme and a source of tension. It's not hard to understand that when you have a set of well-elaborated principles developed at a different point in history, the process of globalization, liberalization and pluralism poses some kind of challenge to it.
On the question of the tyranny of the majority, this is a critical part of the problem: How do you have pluralism in a state that is explicitly committed to Sharia as a core basis of law. Differing a little bit with Peter here, I think Sharia does have more specific content than a kind of generalized instruction to be good and nice and Islamic. There are some specifics. A graphic example is the principle of apostasy: If a Muslim wants to convert from Islam, he should be executed. There have been polls that have asked about that; and substantial numbers, in some countries even majorities, endorse that principle. This obviously is quite at odds with the principle of freedom of religion. People will both endorse the principle of freedom of religion and the principle of death for apostasy. To me, this is an indication of a kind of clash of civilizations that we found throughout the Muslim world.
DR. MATTAIR: Alexis, could you recap for us the main points of Rashid Ghannouchi's recent statements about his views on secularism and its relationship to Islam? Is that a way of keeping the street with the party? Is it tactical? Is it legitimate? Is it honest? From a factual point of view, what did he say and what did he mean?
MS. ARIEFF: One of the things about Ghannouchi is that he speaks all the time. I don't want to be in the position of interpreting exactly what he means, because sometimes it's a bit unclear. That's a complaint his opponents make about his discourse. But I think there has been, at least over the last several years, an evolution in his own thinking. At times he's referred to that evolution in other contexts.
I think he has portrayed Ennahda as encapsulating a middle ground, capturing an Islamic Arab identity among Tunisians that is very strongly felt, yet not seeking to use the state as a tool to impose Islamic practices on the wider population, and tolerating the existence of secular political movements within Tunisian society, while expressing faith that the Ennahda vision has more popular currency than secularism.
This is a fine line that involves elements of theological exegesis as well as pragmatic, old-school political parsing of exactly what it is that you mean. In attempting to elucidate the party's decision not to insist on including Sharia in the draft constitution, he reportedly made a statement along the lines of, "Sharia never left Tunisia, so why do we need to insist on bringing it back?" That's the kind of statement that's very politically effective in Tunisia. A lot of Tunisians point to it and say, right, that's how I feel. On the other hand, his secularist opponents — who think Ennahda is driving a wedge into Tunisia and has a hidden agenda and is playing a very long game — say, look, isn't this ambiguous? He's not saying the government should be a government of men necessarily; he's saying that maybe there is room for a religious interpretation of legislation or what system of government to employ. He has toed a very careful line among many of these different currents.
On the issue of conversion, Ghannouchi has said recently — in remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations in November — that this was one element of his personal evolution. At least, he was quoted as saying that, as an Islamic scholar, he initially didn't understand whether conversion from Islam could be permitted, but that he had studied the texts and determined that it was possible to tolerate such a thing.
The party is wrestling with these matters. Ghannouchi himself is a very savvy political figure, and the leadership of Ennahda is very savvy. The question as we move forward is to what extent that leadership will remain in control, and to what extent the party can hang onto a middle ground while being pressed from both sides.
DR. KULL: Islam is not, as we were saying earlier, monolithic. If you just think about the Bible and all the things that are in the Bible, some of which seem quite contradictory, Islam is equally complex and rich. There's a process going on here of trying to adapt Islam to the current time, and there are a lot of Islamic scholars working on these issues. Islam is not crystallized; it is evolving. That's something that we should see as a positive and productive process.
DR. VOLL: When Ghannouchi was here, I had a chance to chat with him. He'd just come from talking with Senator Lieberman and Senator McCain, and I asked him what he said. Is Islam compatible with democracy? He said, I don't answer that question, because I think democracy is a part of Islam; if a system is not democratic, it can't be identified as being Islamic. Maybe this is elegant theological parsing. But it is also a resolution to the tension that you're talking about, saying that the tension doesn't exist because both sides are part of legitimately understood Sharia.
DR. KULL: I had this meeting with a key person in Pakistan who's responsible for Islamic ideology. He said, We work on it, but then there are all these hotheads who show up on the street with very extreme, literal interpretations, and it becomes quite difficult for them. It's a political process, not just an intellectual process, to somehow reconcile these different strains.
DR. MANDAVILLE: I think the Sharia question is crucial. It's where some of these parties have been the most ambiguous in terms of giving full and detailed answers to questions that are asked of them. And we continue to ask them. And, while I agree with Steve that there is more specific content to Sharia, absolutely, when Americans hear this term, their minds rush first to the cutting off of thieves' heads and the stoning of adulterers and apostasy issues. These exist, but they're part of a very narrow penal code, the Hudud: it is not even implemented in most countries whose constitutions claim Islam is a source of legislation. My point is just that when Muslims hear the term Sharia, that's not where their minds go first. They think of issues of personal status, whether relating to marriage, family law or inheritance, that will be governed according to the specific provisions of Sharia.
Q: Some of the Islamists using the term "secular" West are misusing it. For example, the youth activists of the April 6th Movement, such as Ahmed Maher, were actively networking with people from the old Solidarity movement in Poland to understand how to organize in Egypt. I talked to the head of a leading think tank in Poland, Mr. Zaborowski, and he said this makes perfectly good sense. Poland is a Catholic country and a conservative country. It's not France. The secularists didn't take over. In Germany and Europe generally, they have Christian Democrats and Christian Socialists. Nobody gets upset because the word "Christian" is in the name of the party, referring to their tradition.
DR. MANDAVILLE: The Egyptian activists who were making common cause with counterparts in Serbia and Poland, let's be clear, were not Islamists. Those were among the most secular political forces in Egypt you could find. They had no interest in Poland because Poles were Catholic. They had no interest in the religious convictions of their Serbian counterparts. They were interested in making common cause with them for purely pragmatic reasons, because these were people who had successfully overthrown authoritarian regimes, and they wanted to know how to do it.
That said, the notion of a secular West is problematic. If I want to understand the nature of Islamic space in Egypt right now, the best analogy is the conservative movement in the United States. You have your evangelicals, they're called salafis. You have mainstream social conservatives, that's the Brotherhood. And you have all kinds of spaces in between. This plays into the political discourse in the United States. Prior to 9/11, immigrant Muslim Americans tended to vote Republican — for every good reason. Republicans are social and fiscal conservatives, and they're pro-business. Those are the positions that Muslim families take.
Post-9/11, politics has played out in very odd ways. You see certain Muslim figures trying to reengage with the Republican Party here, their natural home in many ways, and this gets spun as efforts by Islamists to infiltrate the Republican Party. No! They're just going to their natural political home.
Q: There's been a lot of criticism of U.S. foreign policy toward Egypt, with our support of Mubarak. How do we form better relations with this younger generation that has such a huge presence on Twitter and in the blogosphere?
DR. KULL: The young people are a very diverse population. The idea that they represent a secular Western-oriented demographic as opposed to older age groups is really not correct. You find some of the most fanatical elements among the younger people. Older people are a little mellower about some of these issues. What does bind most of these societies together is a perception that the United States is bearing down on them, is coercing them, doesn't respect them and is hostile to Islam. I think there are a variety of ways those can be addressed: affirmative statements and symbolic moves can be made. It's such a broad topic it's hard to not get into specifics. I mean, there are issues about oil. There's a perception, for example, that the United States with the Carter Doctrine has made a claim on all the oil in the Middle East — if they don't give it to us, we're going to come and get it. That's very offensive; it's a violation of their sovereignty. Actually the Carter Doctrine doesn't say that, but we never made any efforts to clarify that we don't mean what they think we mean.
If we systematically look for efforts to reduce the impression that the United States is coercing people in that region and that the United States is hostile to Islam, it would go a long way with all generations.
DR. MATTAIR: My fast answer would be go into government and produce better American foreign policy.
DR. VOLL: I have a quick list of very specific answers as to what can we do to create better relations with the youth. First, give real attention to our immigration policies. Our best export is American-educated Muslims. Yet our programs for international student exchange have been cut by people here in this building. And our information services have been cut. I thought that the U.S. Information Service, USIS, was one of the best cutting-edge vehicles for dealing with the younger generation. Our USIS libraries around the world were places where students could have real access. I loved the little American libraries that take up about five square feet now.
When I have students who want to visit, I can't tell a young Iranian student to just apply for a visa and come. I can't even tell a young Egyptian student that. If his name is Ahmed and he wears a beard, you can count on two hours at Kennedy Airport before he can even come in. So immigration, visas, student exchange, information, helping students overseas through library support in Cairo and so on is practical and it's cheap. Much cheaper than lots of rockets.
DR. MANDAVILLE: I would endorse the merit of some of those practical things. This is something we wrestled with at the State Department in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. There were all kinds of ideas out there — if we build the right Facebook and Twitter sites, they'll think we're cool and in tune with their revolution. What it misses is the fact that this is a technologically engaged generation, but also an incredibly politically conscious and savvy generation. They know what's going on. So after the revolutions, when the United States sounds supportive of their revolution, their first question to us quite rightfully, is why. Why should we believe that you now support democracy in the Middle East? You've spent the last 60 years pursuing policies that would suggest quite the opposite. They're watching what we do very carefully. So we can have the coolest, hippest and most elegant social-media strategy, but what they're watching is what we do in the actual realm of policy. That's what the United States has to get right.
DR. KULL: I want to add one point on that, because I agree with what you said 98 percent. I do think that there are some elements of public diplomacy that do go beyond policy. Generally it's all about policy, but there are other aspects to it, like manners. When you say "please" and "thank you," what you're doing is saying, You don't have to do what you're doing. You're doing it of your own free will, and I recognize and affirm that. This is something that doesn't come through. And in all kinds of little ways we can affirm their autonomy, affirm their right to make their own choices. Right now, that is not how we are experienced. We are experienced as constantly, in all kinds of ways, trying to control them, not giving them space to make their own choices and develop their societies the way they think is best.
Q: Professor Mandaville, do you think the Muslim Brotherhood wants to write a constitution that will work in their favor, not because they are the Muslim Brotherhood, but simply because they are human beings and politicians, and that anybody who is a politician would want to write a constitution, if offered the opportunity to do so, in a way that will privilege his interests and potentially get him re-elected? Second, I would like to agree with you on the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood is a loose coalition of different interests. How do you see this force; will it divide when it gets into power?
DR. MANDAVILLE: On the Constituent Assembly, my sense is that the leadership of the Brotherhood would indeed prefer to have a more inclusive process. But the current political conditions and stakes in Egypt have forced them to take a more aggressive position. What they're looking at primarily is their relationship with the military council. The predominant relationship that they need to manage is that with the armed forces. I think they perceive the military as having said to them, You've got the parliament, but that's all that you're allowed to have; you will stop there. So their foray into both the presidential realm and how they're handling the Constituent Assembly is their way of saying, You will not be the arbiter of our political future.
As to the question of how factionalization plays out once they're in power, the Brotherhood is a very broad space, but there are various forms of hegemony and discipline that work very effectively to keep their policies around certain issues quite cohesive. The key figures there have the upper hand right now. I don't expect the Brotherhood in power to immediately manifest these sorts of internal cleavages that I've identified. Rather, watching these cleavages tells us something about where the Muslim Brotherhood as a movement is likely to be 10 years down the line, rather than what happens six months from now.
Q: On the question on the image of the United States in the Arab world, I don't think it's that bad, given U.S. policy in 2011. The United States supported the Libyans against Qadhafi. They were there doing a job that is well perceived by Syria. And they have been behind the curve in the events in Tunisia and Egypt, which is seen positively actually.
One element I would like you to enlighten us on is the inability of the United States to put forward a peace agenda and the creation of two states. This plays a role in the negative perception of the United States in the Arab world.
DR. KULL: I would like to report that views of the United States have improved in the post-Arab Spring period, but there are no numbers to support it. Before the Arab Spring, I heard in focus groups, The U.S. will never let blank happen. That blank was basically what happened in the Arab Spring. U.S. military forces would prevent it; they would never let the Muslim Brotherhood make any headway. They would never allow any compromise of the military's power, and so on. So I thought, maybe this is going to result in some improvement. The Libya situation actually does not poll well. There is disapproval of the U.S. role. It's once again the United States using its military power. Not that Qadhafi was popular, but they just aren't comfortable with the United States using its military power to take out a leader.
On the subject of Israel, it's curious how little we discussed it. Why is the Israeli-Palestinian issue so much in the foreground, so intense? It has become a very visible, almost iconic image of the West victimizing Islam. You can talk about it vaguely, but when it comes down to those images of Israelis victimizing Palestinians with American support — with weapons that the Americans gave to them — and you see it right there on your television, they say, There, that's it; that's what we're talking about. We feel victimized by that.
It's not so much that Muslims feel so strongly about the Palestinians as people. They themselves haven't always treated the Palestinians all that well. But they identify with them in that relationship. So the message is, as long as that's happening we will not believe there is any fundamental change. It's not that the problem is entirely the Israeli-Palestinian issue. If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were resolved and we had a two-state solution, relations between the United States and the Muslim world would not just clear right up. I don't think it is the cause, but it is a clear symbol that pulls a lot of other feelings into it that are related to broader issues.
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