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| "Islam is the solution" |
Arab revolutions breaking out since late 2010 were
not expected to sail through as soon as power changed hands, says Lebanese
affairs bureau chief of pan-Arab al-Hayat
Walid Choucair.
Commenting on turbulent political change in Egypt and
Syria, he writes in
part:
Forsaking authoritarian regimes that spent decades
stamping out the popular will and domesticating political life is always
fraught with difficulties and pitfalls.
Uprisings against underdevelopment, marginalization,
oppression, humiliation, the plunder of national wealth and the taming of state
institutions are invariably harrowing.
Egypt’s Muslim Brothers were not the only ones to
fail in worming their way to a new regime. Their kinfolk in Tunisia and Morocco
and their ilk in Libya did not fair any better.
Their counterparts in Syria have yet to close ranks
as they wrestle with the regime.
Egypt’s Muslim Brothers failed to seize the
opportunity they got to address their country’s political, economic and social
ills. Hence the alliances that ousted them, which brought together the
military, religious and cultural establishments, opposition parties and the
Tamarrud mass movement.
The irony is: (1) In Egypt, voters gave political
Islam the opportunity to rule and then held it to account on public squares for
its failures (2) In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad’s forces bombed the
squares and the masses crowding them under the guise of fighting political
Islam.
In his weekly column for the independent Beirut daily
an-Nahar, senior analyst Jihad
el-Zein reflects on the quick breakdown of domineering political Islam.
Ushered on by Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, it
took fundamentalist Islam about 35 years to rise to power before starting to
lose its shine. It noticeably went downhill with the outbreak of internecine
strife between Shiite fundamentalism and its Sunni counterpart followed by its
post-Arab Spring self-destruct in Tunisia and Egypt.
The slogan “Islam is the solution” championed in
Egypt by the Muslim Brotherhood and its Islamist allies evaporated posthaste.
The second Egyptian revolution now underway killed
off all political hope that Islamist political movements in the Arab world are
capable of managing successfully the tough and complex issues facing a
nation-state in the contemporary world.
“Islam is the solution” hit a brick wall when
millions of Muslims – most of them devout – avowed in different ways in Egypt,
Tunisia, Turkey, Iran and elsewhere that they do not want a “religious state” and
differentiate between the fate of fundamentalist Islamic movements and Islam as
the religion of 1.6 billion people on the planet.
“Globalization” gave rise to the strongest and most
violent forms of political Islam.
In his essay “The
Spirit of Terrorism,” the late French sociologist, philosopher and cultural
theorist Jean
Baudrillard characterized the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in
New York as a reaction to the technological and political expansion of
capitalist globalization rather than a clash between Islam and America.
The same globalization that instigated the rise of
Islamic fundamentalism in the first place is now knocking it down by various ways
and means.
After overhearing some Cairo news coming from the
radio in my car, an Egyptian worker at a gas station in [the Beirut district
of] Ashrafiyeh, turned to me saying, “The Muslim Brothers strove for 80 years
to take over in Egypt… They won’t give up easily.”
True, but the fact is the Brothers failed in their
first year at the helm in Egypt because of the intricacies of running state
affairs in modern times, especially when issues of state-building and
development – including the economy, social welfare, public transport, gas
prices and the environment – are for the most part independent of Islam.
Whereas Islam is prospering socially and culturally as a religion
across the world, political Islam is in crisis and being challenged in Iran
since 2009, Turkey this month and now Egypt.
The death bell is indeed tolling for the “religious
state.”
