Op-Ed Contributor
The Mirage of Political Islam
By MUSTAPHA TLILI
Five years after his Cairo speech, Obama needs to end his administration’s confusion of Muslims with Islamists.
The Mirage of Political Islam
“You
must maintain your power through consent, not coercion; you must
respect the rights of minorities, and participate with a spirit of
tolerance and compromise; you must place the interests of your people
and the legitimate workings of the political process above your party.
Without these ingredients, elections alone do not make true democracy.”
President Obama delivered these words in his Cairo speech,
five years ago today, when he reached out to rehabilitate Islam and
Islamic civilization in the eyes of the world — and redeem America in
the eyes of the global Muslim community after the Iraq and Afghanistan
wars.
The Cairo speech was part of the road map based on the advice of the 2008 report
“Changing Course: A New Direction for U.S. Relations With the Muslim
World,” drafted by the leadership group on United States-Muslim
engagement, composed of former senior government officials, both
Democrat and Republican, as well as scholars (myself included),
political analysts and international relations experts. All of us were
concerned about the divide between America and the Muslim world, and we
recommended that the new president deliver a major speech in a
significant Islamic capital — Cairo, Istanbul, Jakarta or Rabat —
directly addressing the Muslim world. That’s what Mr. Obama did at Cairo
University on June 4, 2009.
Since then, Egypt has experienced the “Arab Spring,” followed first by the Muslim Brotherhood’s election to power, and then its downfall.
If Mr. Obama’s message of 2009 had been conveyed again more forcefully
to Egypt’s former president, Mohamed Morsi, before he was ousted by the
army last July, the hopes of Arabs and Muslims around the world after
the Cairo speech might not have been as disappointed as they are today.
Sadly,
every one of the “ingredients” for democracy listed by Mr. Obama was
flouted by Mr. Morsi during his tumultuous year in office. He forced the
passage of the Muslim Brotherhood’s 2012 constitution, issued edicts
imposing himself over the judiciary, failed to provide protections to
Coptic Christians, started vendettas against journalists and activists
and treated the secular opposition as enemies to be excluded from
political life. In short, the Egyptian president furthered the political
aims of the Muslim Brotherhood at the expense of the nation, exactly as
Mr. Obama had cautioned against.
The result is that the Obama administration has found itself in an uncomfortable position. As the president remarked
to the United Nations General Assembly last September, “America has
been attacked by all sides of this internal conflict, simultaneously
accused of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, and engineering their
removal of power.”
But
if the administration had been more critical of the Brotherhood’s
infringements of democratic rights, it might have avoided this
situation. Instead, when asked about Mr. Morsi’s fiat of November 2012
that gave his regime extraordinary powers, a State Department spokesman responded,
“this is an Egyptian political process.” Mr. Obama may have said that
“elections alone do not equal democracy,” but America acted as though
elections in Egypt were sufficient. In the words
of America’s ambassador to Egypt, Anne Patterson, “the fact is they ran
in a legitimate election and won” — as if that settled the issue of the
Brotherhood’s fitness for democratic rule.
In Tunisia, the Obama administration adopted a similarly misguided attitude toward Ennahda, the Islamist party then governing, despite allegations of ties to extremists suspected in the assassinations of prominent secular politicians, including Chokri Belaid in February 2013 and Mohamed Brahmi
in July. After the American Embassy in Tunis was attacked by Ennahda’s
Salafist associates, Ansar al-Shariah, in September 2012, the Tunisian media
revealed that Ennahda’s leader, Rachid al-Ghannouchi, had previously
met with Salafist activists and advised them on political strategy.
Before his return
to Tunisia from exile in 2011, Mr. Ghannouchi had been hailed in London
and Washington as a Muslim democrat and a paragon of mlearly a strategic error stemming from a failure to
grasp the nature of political Islam. At root, this misjudgment lies in
the belief that Islamists were ever the legitimate voice of Islam. This
was not what our group meant by “Muslim engagement.”oderation.
Five
years after the Cairo speech, the administration’s ill-advised support
of these regimes is c
During
the decades of dictatorship in the Arab world, political Islamists
marketed themselves in the West as “moderate” movements that sought to
reconcile Islam with democracy. In reality, they were proponents of a
messianic ideology in which the fundamental tenet is to implement God’s
will on earth. While they succeeded in disguising their true intentions
in talks at Chatham House or the Council on Foreign Relations, they could not possibly provide the partner America needed.
As
the Obama team prepared to end the wars of the Bush administration, it
felt a need for friends in the Arab world. So the administration bought
into the fallacy of “moderate” political Islam.
Had
they not fallen for the Islamists’ lip service to democracy, they might
have paid more attention to the new political force that sparked the
Arab Spring: democratic secularism. Regrettably, the United States
failed to recognize the need to strengthen the Muslim world’s secular
democratic parties and empower their supporters, who want to build a
society based on tolerance, moderation, the rule of law, women’s rights
and constitutional freedoms. Just as America worked to stop the spread
of Communism after World War II, the Obama administration could have
invested in civil society groups and secular democratic parties in the
Muslim world.
Few
will dispute that Islamism in its “moderate” form is now in retreat. It
took just a year for the incompetence of the Muslim Brotherhood in
Egypt to reveal itself (the fall
of Ennahda in Tunisia took longer). Washington must acknowledge the new
reality, and engage with the Sisi government in Egypt and with
Tunisia’s secular political parties ahead of national elections later
this year.
How
to channel the aspirations of that segment of the Egyptian and Tunisian
societies that is rural, pious, illiterate and conservative remains a
real challenge. Typically, such people are poor and lack economic
opportunity. From the period of the dictatorships to the elections made
possible by the Arab Spring, these populations were courted by the
Islamists and developed into a strong constituency. In Egypt and Tunisia
especially, but throughout the Muslim world, political systems must
find ways to integrate these communities into the political and economic
life of the nation.
This
is not only for the sake of social justice, but also to shut the door
on Islamism, both “moderate” and jihadist. In this difficult task,
America should help, not hinder, the secular democrats of the Muslim
world. It is in America’s national interest.
Mustapha Tlili,
a novelist and a research scholar at New York University, is the
founder and director of the N.Y.U. Center for Dialogues: Islamic World -
U.S. - the West.
COPY http://www.nytimes.com
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