Middle East: America’s democracy advance puts secularism into retreat

By Abid Mustafa

Not so long ago, President Bush announced his much coveted Greater Middle
East Initiative. The aim of the plan was to preserve the existing secular
order across the region through the promotion of freedom and democracy. But
in today’s Middle Eastern societies, Bush’s initiative is having just the
opposite effect. Islamists throughout the region have shown unprecedented
gains in recent elections and now pose a direct challenge to the
dictatorships and monarchies that thrive under American patronage.

During Egypt’s parliamentary elections in 2005, the Muslim Brotherhood
secured 20% of the seats. Had not Mubarak’s regime resorted to intimidation
in the second and third rounds of the balloting, the figure would have been
much higher. But despite the regimes brutal tactics to suppress the
Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood employed the slogan ‘Islam is the
solution’ and outperformed secular rivals in garnering greater support
amongst Egypt’s electorate.

In the Iraqi parliamentary elections of 2005, the religious parties took the
bulk of the Iraqi votes. Of 275 seats in the Council of Representatives, the
Shia dominated United Iraqi Alliance won 128 seats. The alliance includes
the Dawa Party led by Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and the Supreme
Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. The
alliance fell 10 votes short of an absolute majority. The Sunni
fundamentalists of the Iraqi Accord Front secured 44 seats, while Kurdish
Islamists took 5 seats. Had not America and her surrogates interfered
directly in the electoral process the strength of the Islamists’ vote would
have completely marginalized the secularists. In any case, the Iraqi Council
of Representatives will be dominated by representatives who have a strong
religious disposition and are expected to throw out policies which they deem
to be overtly secular.

The outcome of the Palestinian election scheduled for January 25 2006 will
probably mimic the election results of Egypt and Iraq. Already pollsters are
predicting a strong showing for Hamas which is avidly anti-Israeli and has
vowed its destruction. Hamas fielding 62 candidates is projected to take
more than a third of the 132 seats available in the Palestinian Legislative
Council. Threats from Israel to preclude the organisation from contesting
the election and America’s dislike of its hard-line stance have boosted the
group’s popularity.  Apart from Fatah, the other secular party’s cannot
mount an effective challenge to growing influence of Hamas and other
Islamists. Fatah reeling from internal schisms and widely viewed as being
corrupt will be the main looser.

The pattern of Islamists outshining secularists in elections is being
repeated elsewhere in the Arab world. For instance in the Saudi municipal
elections last year, Islamists won 6 of the 7 seats in Riyadh and swept the
elections in Jeddah and Makkah. Candidates backed by Sunni Islamists also
won control of the municipal councils in a number of towns in the Eastern
Province. In the 2003 parliamentary election in Yemen, the Yemeni Reform
Group (Islah), a combination of Islamist and tribal elements, won 46 of the
301 seats and now forms the opposition. That year, Islamists combined to win
17 of the 50 seats in the Kuwaiti parliament, where they form the dominant
ideological bloc. In Jordan, Bahrain and Morocco too, Islamists have made
gains often at the expense of secularists

The ubiquitous presence of Islamists and the rapid decline of the
secularists have altered the political landscape of the Arab world. Early
indications suggest that this transformation is going to be permanent.
According to the 2004 Zogby International-Sadat Chair poll, of those
surveyed in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE said the clergy should play a
greater role in their political systems. Fifty percent of Egyptians polled
said the clerics should not dictate the political system, but as many as 47
percent supported a greater role for them. So the political trend is clear;
more democratic the Arab world gets, the more likely it is that Islamists
will come to power.

Not only has Bush’s democracy drive in the Middle East strengthened
political Islam it has also failed to stymie the tide of militant Islam
which grows more violent by the day. In April 2005, the US State Department
decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after
the government’s top terrorism centre concluded that there were more
terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the
publication covered. Another casualty of this initiative has been the battle
of hearts and minds. According to the 2005 Zogby poll on Arab attitudes
towards America, 63% of Jordanians, 85 % of Egyptians, 89% of Saudis, 66% of
Lebanese, and 69% of the people in UAE had an unfavourable opinion of
America.

The collapse of Bush’s plan to advance democracy in the Middle East has not
escaped the attention of policy makers back home. A bitter dispute has
broken out between supporters of Bush and the critics of his plan. The
opponents of his plan argue that Bush is not doing enough to isolate the
Islamists and promote the moderates as part of the democracy push in the
Middle East. They also maintain that Islamists, especially those that are
vociferously anti-American cannot be trusted and must be excluded from the
democracy experiment. Their view is based on the idea that the refusal of
the Muslim world to accept western values lies with the ideology of Islam.
In their opinion the Islamic texts have to fundamentally change before the
Arab world can be accepted by the West.

The supporters on the other hand advocate a more pragmatic approach. They
believe that by co-opting Islamists in the democratic process, the Arab
world can be moulded into a region that accepts western values, is
substantially less anti-American and willingly accepts American hegemony.
Their belief rests on the premise that by keeping Islamists out of the
democratic process will only breed resentment and violence against the West.
They cite Turkey as the ideal model for the Arab world to follow. A major
proponent of this view is the neoconservative Marc Gerecht who recently
argued in an article entitled ‘Devout Democracies’ that self rule in the
Muslim world will have a religious component and the West should not be
afraid of this phenomena.

Whichever of the two views succeeds in guiding America’s democracy
experiment in the Middle East, it will have a negligible impact on curbing
the rise of political Islam. This is because the people of the Middle East
will never forget or forgive America’s unstinting support for Israel, her
unflinching support for the brutal Arab dictatorships, her exploitation of
their natural resources, her imposition of capitalist solutions and values,
and her determined efforts to wage wars against the people of Iraq and other
Muslims. These painful realities are permanently etched on the minds of the
Arabs and continuously urge the Arab populace to seek solace in political
Islam.

The Middle East is the heart of the Islamic world and right now it is
pulsating with political Islam that will inevitably lead to the re-emergence
of the Caliphate. Promoting democracy or eschewing its implementation,
substituting Islamic texts with secular interpretations, isolating Islamists
and encouraging moderates, destroying regimes and replacing them with
compliant US surrogates is not going to change the outcome. America’s past
relations with the Arabs has sealed her fate with the present Arabs. The
time has come for US policy makers to think about the future – what type of
relations does the US want with the Caliphate?