Imtiyaz Yusuf
The recent elections in Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt, resulting in victory for Muslim democrats, has led to fears among non-Muslims around the world.
They fear the return of violence, terrorism and attacks on non-Muslims. But the fact is that the Muslim democrats have never engaged in such activity. The image of Islam created by the West, depicting Muslims as a violent people, as evidenced in many books written by both Western and Eastern scholars, will not go away easily. The stereotypes about Islamophobia are so deeply ingrained that people are not ready to address their biases and prejudices about Islam and Muslims. No matter how much effort Turkey undertakes towards change to gain EU membership, no matter how many sacrifices the Middle-Eastern Muslims make to change and reform their systems, prejudices about Islam and Muslims will remain for some time.
The Islamic world is still, and will for a long time, be viewed through the lens of Islamophobia, even after the hard struggle by Middle-Easterners to remove dictatorships and embark on the path of democracy. The ghosts of Islam created by Bin Laden and George Bush still hover globally. The notion of a Muslim exception to civilisational change remains deeply ingrained in the psyche. Muslim authoritarian leaders and their cohorts have contributed towards reinforcing Islamophobia, for they try to hold onto their power in order to protect their self-interests, even at the expense of the masses.
The drastic political change that the “Arab Spring” has brought in the Middle East – the outcomes of which are being currently witnessed through the electoral victories of the democratic parties in some countries – should be welcomed as a step in the right direction toward a brighter economic and political future for the Muslim world. It is time to revisit the prejudices against Islam and Muslims.
The political change in the Middle East is led by grassroots Muslim democrats of different political shades – liberal, activist, moderate and fundamentalist – as well as the communists of the Muslim world who were kept out of power for decades.
The Muslim parties won majorities in the Tunisian, Moroccan and Egyptian elections, and will probably also win in Yemen, Syria and other Muslim countries in the future. The future of the Middle East will be formed by coalition governments made up of all colours of the political spectrum, who will compete to form governments.
Political Islam exists in different forms in the Muslim world: moderate and fundamentalist parties in Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Lebanon and Palestine; theocracies in Saudi Arabia and Iran; Turkey, where Islam is the point of reference for the ruling AKP Party in a secular democracy; and the radical Islamism of al-Qaeda, the Taleban and Jemaah Islamiyah. The first three are based on the ideology of Muslim nationalism, and the last in pan-Islamism.
The victory of the Muslim democratic parties in the new Middle East is the fruit of decades of suffering, sacrifice, torture and imprisonment during the days of dictatorship. The future model of Middle-Eastern governments in the aftermath of the Arab Spring will be that of a Muslim democracy where personal freedom will not be curbed, and international treaties respected. In other words, the future will be a coalition between religious and secular nationalists. The religious nationalists are not national socialists or neo-fascists, nor al-Qaeda or the Taleban. Examples of non-Muslim religious nationalists are found in the ruling Christian Democratic Union in Germany, which operates along the principles of Christian democracy, and the ideologically right-of-centre Bharatiya Janata Party in India, which follows the ideology of integral humanism based on Indian philosophy.
Politics in the Muslim world will, at best, be semi-secular, as seen in other Asian and African countries; it cannot be fully secular as in the diverse West, where in some countries religion is still only a point of reference. Muslims may accept separation between religion and politics but not between state and the Muslim culture of the populace.
The Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt which won 36 per cent of the 9.7 million votes in the first round of the election, is also expected to win in the next rounds as well, and will most probably form an alliance with the liberal and centrist Muslim parties to overtake the Salafist Nour Party, which won around 24 per cent of the vote and has a conservative religious and socio-cultural agenda. Yet, the tussle between parties, generals and activists in Egypt is not over. The future for a better Egypt demands cooperation from all the political shades in the country.
The Tunisian constituent assembly election, with the victory of the Muslim democratic party Ennahda, brought a lot of surprises. The Tunisians are in no mood for internal political conflict; they prefer dialogue. The new government will be a Muslim-secular coalition with leaders who were imprisoned by the ousted Ben Ali. Its agenda will be development and justice. The new constituent assembly has more female members than the legislative bodies in the US, the UK, France and others. Of the 49 female members of the Tunisian assembly, 42 are Muslim democrats.
In July, after some earlier protests, King Mohammad VI of Morocco introduced constitutional amendments towards empowering government and parliament. He also introduced measures to allow for gender equality, social pluralism, economic development, political freedom, social welfare and rights of the cultural minorities, such as making the Amazigh language of the Berbers an official language. All of this had a great impact on the political situation. In the November election, Parti de la Justice et du Developpement (PJD), also advocating Muslim democracy, won a majority. The PJD, the Democratic Bloc, along with the socialists and communists, will now form the new Moroccan government.
The winds of the Arab Spring have been invigorated by the political transformations taking place in the Middle East; it is of dismay to some locals and outsiders, but a comfort to the majority. Arab countries are embarking on a path to democracy grounded in their grassroots.
At the last count in 2010, the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), a group of 57 countries, had only five democratic members – Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Pakistan. In 2011, it is witnessing a growth in the number of democracies within it.
Dr Imtiyaz Yusuf is professor of Islamics and religion at the Graduate School of Philosophy and Religion, Assumption University, Bangkok.
