HA Hellyer Friday 20 February 2015
If we are to understand the role Islamists play around the world we need to move beyond generalisation
Rachid Ghannouchi (right), leader of the Islamist Ennahda movement. ‘Islamists are not equivalent to al-Qaida, but neither are they all natural allies for progressive, democratic politics.’ Photograph: Zohra Bensemra/Reuters
Four years after the Arab spring, the region and the world are still grappling with the aftermath, including the rise – and fall – of different Islamist movements. On Wednesday, in the midst of a summit on extremism, Barack Obama said: “We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.” After the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the French prime minister, Manuel Valls, said his country was engaged in a war “against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islamism”.
But while western leaders have been very clear they are not at war with “Islam” – the religion of more than a billion people – there has been far less clarity about what “Islamism”, let alone “radical Islamism”, actually means.
Islamism incorporates a wide range of viewpoints. It includes the Muslim Brotherhood and other political groupings that engage in public life, as well as extremist organisations such as Daesh (ISIS) that rely solely on violence. In Britain, two broad approaches to Islamism have been in evidence. The first views all Islamist groups as more or less the same as al-Qaida in terms of their beliefs, seeing only differences in tactics. An increasing number of political figures in the Arab world share this view.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are those who see Islamists as broadly pluralistic and progressive. They put their faith in reformist moderates winning through.
Both of these approaches are short-sighted, and wrong.
The Muslim Brotherhood, the largest Islamist movement, is a broad church, as it were. And then there are other versions of Islamism, embodied by the Salafis of the Nour Party in Egypt, the Islamist-leaning AKP in Turkey and the Shia Muslims of Hezbollah. Lumping them all together is not simply to ignore nuances. It diverts our attention and resources away from groups that carry out brutal attacks like the ones in Paris, in Yemen – where more than 30 were slaughtered on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo attack – as well as insurgents in the Sinai peninsula aligned with Isis who have killed dozens of Egyptians, and Libyan affiliates of Isis who killed almost two dozen Christians earlier this month.
During the revolutionary uprisings in the Arab world I was living in Cairo, where I saw the Brotherhood’s rise to power after the deposition of Hosni Mubarak. From 2011 to 2013, western governments found themselves engaging with a sectarian and reactionary political force; the Brotherhood’s Libyan counterpart refused to recognise the results of Libya’s election in 2014 and remains aligned in a broad coalition that includes extremely radical groups. But over a similar period the Tunisian Islamist party, Ennahda, showed itself profoundly committed to that country’s democratic experiment. Many hoped the Brotherhood and other Islamists would follow the lead of relatively open-minded figures such as Rachid Ghannouchi in Tunisia. But that tendency did not dominate, and it was naive to believe that movements based on reactionary ideas, raised in environments of oppression, would automatically be reformist or progressive once in power.
In Britain, after the 7 July 2005 bombings, investment in nurturing more temperate Islamists initially paid off. We saw engagement with pro-Islamist non-violent, groups, which countered far more radical influences such as Abu Hamza al-Masri. But are such groups genuinely progressive? On a number of issues some of them are not, but to prevent them contributing to civil society is not the right strategy either.
The flaw in both approaches is that they generalise far too much. Islamists are not equivalent to al-Qaida – but nor are all Islamists automatically natural allies for progressive, democratic politics. Just as there is a variety of strands of communism and socialism, which have produced peaceful as well as violent outcomes, so there is a complex set of political ideologies within Islamism.
The forces of Bashar al-Assad have taken far more lives than all the Islamists combined
Consistency also demands we recognise that challenges to a more progressive, democratic future in the Middle East are not solely borne of Islamist movements. Indeed, in Syria, the forces of Bashar al-Assad have taken far more lives than Islamists everywhere. Different types of authoritarianism continue to exist across the region – some in hard line opposition to Islamism.
Consistency is not easy, but it is possible. In 2002, Edward Said and others formed the Palestinian National Initiative – an effort to carve out a third way that rejected both the radical reactionaries of Hamas and the corrupt Fatah movement. Likewise, political upheaval in Egypt produced many faux liberals but it also gave rise to principled voices, some of whom were at the heart of the 25 January revolutionary moment. Before the widespread brutal crackdown on the Brotherhood, public intellectuals such as Ibrahim El Houdaiby and human rights defenders including Heba Morayef engaged with and criticised Islamists. Groups that tended towards sectarianism and flirted with vigilantism needed to be critiqued, but with nuance, without automatically equating them to al-Qaida.
The world faces a continual challenge to uphold fairness and justice. To meet that challenge we must refrain from generalisations that encourage us to mark groups down as enemies or friends without considering their unique origins, conduct and relationship to others.
As the lines are drawn more narrowly in the region and elsewhere, that principle may become harder to hold on to – but it remains the right thing to do.
