Many of the Islamists aren’t liberal pluralists at heart. They want Islam to be their countries’ official religion. They want some form of Sharia to be the basis of civil law. They don’t like Israel, and they don’t like U.S. policy on Israel.
All that has made many Americans identify the Islamists as an outcome to the revolutions that we can’t live with. Some members of Congress have suggested that U.S. aid to Egypt be cut off if the Muslim Brotherhood wins a majority in the country’s parliament.
But there are three problems with that kind of thinking: The Islamists are a legitimate political force, they’re likely to win in free elections, and they’re not going away.
Then we should have no relations with these countries.
The new Arab democracies have Islamist parties for much the same reason that Israel has Jewish religious parties and Italy has a conservative Catholic party: Some voters want to see their religious beliefs reflected in their country’s politics. In the United States, though they don’t have a separate party, many Christian conservatives might embrace that sentiment too.
Another revolting moral equivalence. There is no comparison between the totalitarianism of islamic law and Jewish parties in Israel and Catholic parties in Italy.
The problem with Islamists, unlike those other religious politicians, is that in some places, when they have gained power, they have shut democracy down, denying secular parties a chance to compete. That’s what happened in Iran. But in Turkey and Iraq, it hasn’t.
Thousands of Christians have had to flee Iraq. The ruling Turkish AKP islamic party has cracked down on the opposition and imprisoned members of the secular armed forces on trumped-up charges.
And there’s broader evidence that over the long run, Islamic parties aren’t the threat to democracy that many believe. Two researchers at the University of North Carolina, Charles Kurzman and Ijlal Naqvi, have studied 160 elections in the Muslim world in which Islamist parties competed. They found that Islamists tended to score highest in “breakthrough” elections, the first votes held after a revolution. But after that, secular parties tended to gain strength.
“In general, the more routine elections become, the worse Islamic parties do,” they found. “In those Muslim-majority countries where elections were freest, Islamic parties performed worse.”
Moreover, they found that over time Islamic parties often liberalize in order to win support from more moderate voters. That may already be happening in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood has said that it believes non-Islamist groups, including Christians, should get a voice in writing a new constitution, and where the leader of one major Islamist faction has called for a new and more tolerant “Islamic liberalism.”
Egypt’s Ibrahim, for one, believes the practice of democracy could temper the Islamists’ ideology. “The only way the Islamists can gain legitimacy is to turn into democrats,” he said. “We should give them a chance.”
Is the LA Times actually falling for such an absurd claim that the muslim brotherhood wants Christians to have a voice? Is that why the Coptics are being increasingly persecuted? “islamic liberalism” is a contradiction in terms. This Ibrahim is certainly playing the LA Times like a fiddle and getting the paper to act as useful idiots for the jihadists. Read the rest
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