President Barack Obama speaks at Cairo University in Cairo, Egypt, Thursday, Jun. 4, 2009. In his speech, President Obama called for a 'new beginning between the United States and Muslims', declaring that 'this cycle of suspicion and discord must end'. Credit: White House photo

By Emile Nakhleh
WASHINGTON, Jan 6 2015 (IPS)

This year, Arab political Islam will be greatly influenced by U.S. regional policy, as it has been since the Obama administration came into office six years ago. Indeed, as the U.S. standing in the region rose with Obama’s presidency beginning in January 2009, so did the fortunes of Arab political Islam.

But when Arab autocrats perceived U.S. regional policy to have floundered and Washington’s leverage to have diminished, they proceeded to repress domestic Islamic political parties with impunity, American protestations notwithstanding.Coddling autocrats is a short-term strategy that will not succeed in the long run. The longer the cozy relationship lasts, the more Muslims will revert to the earlier belief that America’s war on terrorism is a war on Islam.

This policy linkage, expected to prevail in the coming year, will not bode well for political Islam. Like last year, the U.S. will in 2015 pay more attention to securing Arab autocrats’ support in the fight against Islamic State forces than to the mistreatment of mainstream Islamic political parties and movements, which will have severe consequences in the long run.

Since the middle of 2013, the Obama administration’s focus on the tactical need to woo dictators in the fight against terrorist groups has trumped its commitment to the engagement objective. America’s growing support for Arab dictators meant that Arab political Islam would be sacrificed.

For example, Washington seems oblivious to the thousands of mainstream Islamists and other opposition activists languishing in Egyptian jails.

What is political Islam?

Several assumptions underpin this judgment. First, “political Islam” applies to mainstream Islamic political parties and movements, which have rejected violence and made a strategic shift toward participatory and coalition politics through free elections.

Arab political Islam generally includes the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan, Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, al-Nahda in Tunisia, and al-Wefaq in Bahrain.

The term “political Islam” does not include radical and terrorist groups such as the Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL or IS), al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Iraq, and Syria, or armed opposition groups in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya. Nor does it apply to terrorist groups in Africa such as Boko Haram, al-Shabab, and others.

Unfortunately, in the past three years, many policy makers in the West, and curiously in several Arab countries, have equated mainstream political Islam with radical and terrorist groups. This erroneous and self-serving linkage has provided Washington with a fig leaf to justify its cozy relations with Arab autocrats and tolerance of their bloody repression of their citizens.

Repression breeds radicalism

It has also given these autocrats an excuse to suppress their Islamic parties and exclude them from the political process. In a press interview late last month, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi forcefully denounced the Muslim Brotherhood and pledged the movement would not enter the Egyptian parliament.

Egypt’s recent terrorism laws, which Sisi and other Arab autocrats have approved, provide them with a pseudo-legal cover to silence the opposition, including mainstream political Islam.

They have used the expansive and vague definitions of terrorism included in these decrees to incarcerate any person or group that is “harmful to national unity.” Any criticism of the regime or the ruler is now viewed as a “terrorist” act, punishable by lengthy imprisonment.

The Dec. 28 arrest of the Bahraini Sheikh Ali Salman, Secretary General of al-Wefaq, is yet another example of draconian measures against peaceful mainstream opposition leaders and parties in the region. Regime repression of these groups is expected to prevail in 2015.

Second, whereas terrorist organisations are a threat to the region and to Western countries, including mainstream political Islam in the governance of their countries in the long run is good for domestic stability and regional security. It also serves the interests of Western powers in the region.

Recent history tells U.S. that exclusion and repression often lead to radicalisation.  Some youth in these parties have given up on participatory politics in favour of confrontational politics and violence. This phenomenon is expected to increase in 2015, as suppression of political Islam becomes more pervasive and institutionalised.

Third, the serious mistakes the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Nahda made in their first time ever as governing parties should not be surprising since they lacked the experience of governance. Such poor performance, however, is not unique to them.  Nor should it be used as an excuse to depose them illegally and to void the democratic process, as the Sisi-led military coup did in Egypt in 2013.

Although Islamic political parties tend to win the first election after the toppling of dictators, the litmus test of their popular support lies in succeeding elections. The recent post-Arab Spring election in Tunisia is a case in point.

When Arab citizens are provided with the opportunity to participate in fair and free elections, they are capable of electing the party that best serves their interests, regardless of whether the party is Islamic or secular.

Had Field Marshall Sisi in 2013 allowed the Muslim Brotherhood and President Mohammed Morsi to stay in power until the following election, they would have been voted out, according to public opinion polls at the time.

But Sisi and his military junta were not truly committed to a genuine democratic transition in Egypt. Now, according to Human Rights Watch reports, the current state of human rights in Egypt is much worse than it was under former President Hosni Mubarak.

The U.S. and Political Islam

Upon taking office, President Obama understood that disagreements between the United States and the Muslim world, especially political Islam, were driven by specific policies, not values of good governance. A key factor driving these disagreements was the widely held Muslim perception that America’s war on terror was a war on Islam.

The Obama administration also realised that while a very small percentage of Muslims engaged in violence and terrorism, the United States must find ways to engage the other 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide. That drove President Obama early on in his administration to grant media interviews to Arab broadcasters and give his historic Cairo speech in June 2009.

However, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on, and as drone strikes caused more civilian casualties in Yemen, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, many Muslims became more sceptical of Washington’s commitment to sincere engagement with the Muslim world.

The Arab uprisings beginning in 2011 known as the Arab Spring and the toppling of dictators prompted the United States to support calls for freedom, political reform, dignity, and democracy.

Washington announced it would work with Islamic political parties, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Nahda, as long as these parties were committed to peaceful change and to the principles of pluralism, elections, and democracy.

That unprecedented opening boosted the fortunes of Arab political Islam and inclusive politics in the Arab world. American rapprochement with political Islam, however, did not last beyond two years.

The way forward

Much as one might disagree with Islamic political ideology, it’s the height of folly to think that long-term domestic stability and economic security in Egypt, Bahrain, Palestine, or Lebanon could be achieved without including the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Wefaq, Hamas, and Hezbollah in governance.

Coddling autocrats is a short-term strategy that will not succeed in the long run. The longer the cozy relationship lasts, the more Muslims will revert to the earlier belief that America’s war on terrorism is a war on Islam.

The Arab countries that witnessed the fall of dictators, especially Egypt, will with Washington’s acquiescence revert back to repression and autocracy, as if the Arab Spring never happened.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Demonstrators in Tahrir Square celebrating the ouster of former President Mohamed Morsi. Credit: Hisham Allam/IPS

By Hisham Allam
CAIRO, Jul 5 2013 (IPS)

In less than three days, Egypt moved from being under the rule of religious Islamists to being in different civilian hands as well as military ones. Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, was overthrown by the army on Wednesday after massive nationwide protests calling for his removal on the first anniversary of his election to power.

The powerful military issued a 48-hour deadline on Monday for Morsi to meet the “people’s demands”, a day after millions of protesters took to the streets across the troubled country calling for him to resign.

The position of the United States towards its allies in Egypt (the Muslim Brotherhood) was critical. U.S. President Barack Obama declared that Washington would review the implications for U.S. foreign assistance programmes to Egypt, as an estimated 20 percent of Egypt’s military budget is provided by the United States.

Obama stopped short of calling the events a coup, however, while Egyptians see the change as a public movement that completes the revolution of Jan. 25, 2011, which was supported by the army.

Less than 15 hours after the minister of defence, Field Marshal Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, declared the road map for the transitional period, he announced that Egypt’s constitution had been suspended and gave power to the head of the Supreme Court, Adly Mansour, naming him interim president of the republic for six months, according to the 1971 constitution.

Several changes occurred in different sectors after Morsi’s fall. The stock exchange rose 7.5 percent, progress unseen since 2010. Financial shares did not decrease until the end of the day – also an unprecedented achievement in the history of the Egyptian stock exchange. Mohsen Adel, an economic analyst, told IPS he was expecting a continuous rise in banking sector indicators as well.

On a regional scale, the events of Jul. 3 helped Egypt to maintain its leading role in the Arab world and renew relations with a number of Arab countries.

Qatar, the strongest supporter of former president Morsi, announced on Al Jazeera television that it would support Egypt in its role as the leader of the Arab and Islamic world. The new emir of Qatar, Tamim ben Hamad, sent his congratulations to the new president and the Egyptian people.

Both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates announced they would supply Egypt with funding and oil as the situation progresses. Relations between Egypt and the United Arab Emirates were tense after the UAE arrested a terrorist cell that included elements belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood. The UAE government refused to release them, leading Muslim Brotherhood leaders to attack and insult UAE rulers.

On Jun. 17, Esam Al-Eryan, vice president of the Freedom and Justice Party, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, attacked the Emirati government at Al Shura council, asking the Egyptian ambassador to deliver the message, “Emirati people are ignorant with disgraceful behaviour, and the Iranian nuclear power coming to invade you and will turn your people to slaves.”

“The map of Egyptian relations with many neighbouring countries will witness a huge change in the near future,” Emad Gad, the director of al-Ahram Institute for Strategic and Political Studies, told IPS.

Gad asserted that relations with the United States might be tense in the current situation because of the country’s support for Morsi and the Brotherhood. Strategic relations between the two countries are deeply rooted, and if the United States continues pressuring Egypt by threatening to reduce or halt military aid, Egypt’s relations with Russia and China could shift as a result.

Such a change would be a major danger for the United States because Egypt’s source of military arms would shift to Russia, which would threaten both U.S. control over the Egyptian army and U.S. national security.

Egypt’s tensions with Syria will calm down, and Egypt may not make any hostile decisions against the regime of Bashar Al-Assad regime, Gad continued, though the new government would not be involved in supporting the current regime for fear it would undermine the Syrian people or induce the disapproval of the international community.

“Egypt and Russia will witness a new stage of successful cooperation in the near future, and I think there could be cooperation on  different levels between the two countries,” Gad said, due to Russia’s support for the Egyptian revolution since the events of Jun. 30.

“From the beginning of the deep changes in the Middle East we have declared support for lawful aspirations of the Egyptian people for a better life with freedom and democratic renewal. Russia’s position remains invariable and principled,” the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement on Thursday.

Egyptians saw the rapid arrest of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood not as a military coup but as precautionary steps to prevent the Brotherhood from directing their angry supporters in the streets towards bloody violence, especially since the country had witnessed acts of sabotage leading to dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries before the ouster of the former president.

In his last speech, Morsi tried to perform as a self-confident legal president, alluding that any move against him would be a coup against legitimacy.

Meanwhile Ahmed Badie, a spokesman for al-Watan Salafist Party, founded in 2013, told IPS, “You cannot shun the [Islamist] project because of the strength of their parties and the [Islamist] powers in the Egyptian street. It will be very hard to keep them away from the political scene for their large numbers and their political contribution.”

Badie believed that the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood was natural given its accumulated mistakes and refusal to listen to suggestions given to them by his party. The failure of the experience of the Muslim Brotherhood does not mean that other Islamist political parties would abandon the target of establishing an Islamic state but demonstrates how difficult such an achievement would be.

The roadmap currently being drawn by Islamist parties will be to ensure the safety of the members of the different parties. This will be trying to ensure that the police will not return to their previous violence or strict practises against Islamists, such as forcing them to shave their beards, Badie said.

He expressed fear that the new regime would forbid Islamists from creating political parties and thus hinder their Islamist project, noting that the arrest of several leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood was evident in trying to give the military coup a public cover.

Mokhtar Nouh, the former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood told IPS, “The [Islamist] project does not fall with groups or individuals; previously under Nasser, it was thought that it fell, but Omar el-Telmessany [the Muslim Brotherhood’s third Supreme Guide] managed to bring it back to the political scene since 1990, even under the exclusion of the Mubarak regime.”