Demokratisk islamism

Adam Shatz är i senaste numret av London Review of Books optimistisk om islamistiska rörelsers demokratisering i Mellanöstern; enligt Shatz, som åberopar sociologen Asef Bayat, så har islamister sett Turkiet och Indonesien som exempel på att man kan förena demokrati med islamskt leverne.

Om islamismens lockelse:

"Whenever Islamists such as Hamas came to power in elections, other, more comforting explanations were sought for their success. What appealed to voters was their opposition to corruption, their dedication to ‘resistance’, their charitable work providing education and healthcare in slums: anything but their belief in faith-based governance. But in the Arab world today, these selling points are all part of the same package. Since the collapse of Nasserism in 1967, Islamism has provided the Arabs with an idiom of resistance, one with an even stronger claim to cultural authenticity than secular nationalism. The lustre of Islamism has also been burnished by concrete achievements: the success of the AKP in Turkey and Erdogan’s growing stature as a regional leader who has defied American wishes; the 2006 ‘divine victory’ of Hizbullah in Lebanon, which washed away some of the humiliation the Arabs have felt since the 1967 defeat. Erdogan and Hizbullah’s secretary general, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, are folk heroes in Egypt."

Om demokratisering av islamismen:

"The Islamism of today is very different from the Islamism of the 1980s and 1990s, when radical jihadis rose up against secular-nationalist regimes in Syria, Algeria and Egypt, turning Hama, Algiers and Cairo into war zones. Their interpretation of majority rule doesn’t always make room for minority rights, but aside from al-Qaida and a fringe of extremists, Islamists now aim to achieve their goals through democratic politics. Even the hardline Salafis, who for years rejected elections as un-Islamic, have been grudgingly won over. Islamists have been chastened by their experience of state repression, and by al-Qaida’s attacks against fellow Muslims, which disgusted even those Muslims who had been inclined to see Osama bin Laden as a defender of the faith. They have also drawn important lessons from the experience of Turkey and Indonesia, which persuaded them that, as the sociologist Asef Bayat puts it, ‘Muslims could confidently remain Muslim but also have a democratic state.’

Today’s Islamists are far from liberal, but they understand that they have much to gain from working with liberals, and that democratic governance may provide the ummah, and the faith itself, with better protection than a rigid Islamic state such as Iran or Saudi Arabia. Bayat describes the loose coalition of liberal and Islamist democrats as ‘post-Islamist’, in that they seek to establish ‘a pious society within a democratic state’, drawing inspiration from religion but emphasising rights over obligations."

Shatz, "Whose Egypt?", London Review of Books 5 januari 2012