The Battle for the Arab Spring

by Lin Noueihed

  But whatever the will and intentions of an individual man might be, many other political, social and business interests rely on his retention of power. A ruling family that decides its long-term survival is best guaranteed by shifting towards a constitutional monarchy will meet stiff resistance from those groups who stand to lose the most from change.

  Lines of succession, and the credibility of future monarchs, will also be crucial. Jordan's King Abdullah may try to draw on his Hashemite lineage, which traces itself back to the family of the Prophet Mohamed, as does the dynasty of King Mohamed in Morocco. Their successors are likely to harness similar claims to legitimacy in the future, though their effectiveness is uncertain. The Al Sauds successfully managed a reshuffle of senior members in November 2011 after the long-expected death of Crown Prince Sultan, and despite potentially explosive tensions within the sprawling ruling family, there are structures and processes in place to help guide the distribution of power. Yet the line to the Saudi throne is occupied by geriatric leaders who may lack the vision and energy to make the changes required to prepare their country for the post-oil era and all that it entails.

  Over time, too, generational tensions within each country will become stronger. Many Moroccans and Jordanians still remember the more oppressive rules of King Hassan and King Hussein respectively. Yet in both countries, a rising number of young people are looking more towards democracies as their political inspiration rather than remaining satisfied with the relatively stable and less repressive domestic conditions that were denied to their parents.

  Similarly, the new generation in the UAE or Qatar did not grow up during the process of state-building and independence. Their sense of allegiance to the ruling family is arguably weaker than that of their parents’ generation, and they do not remember the hardships of the pre-oil era. With more of them exposed to and often educated in the West and wired into the Twittersphere, there will be greater bottom-up pressure for political participation that might oppose Gergash's view in 2006 that elections would not question the dynastic nature of the state.

  But all of the Arab monarchies are likely to survive in the short term. The GCC possesses the collective financial strength to appease its own populations and, if necessary, fund Morocco and Jordan to do the same. Any youth or Shi'ite-led uprising in Saudi Arabia will likely be met with a potent combination of religious decrees, suppression and money. The UAE and Qatar face little organized domestic opposition and can afford to nurture their privileged national elite. Kuwait may move more quickly towards a constitutional monarchy, with popular protests – including one in November described as the largest in Kuwaiti history – and parliamentary opposition finally managing to remove its unpopular prime minister in December. But other Gulf states will be reluctant to see the Kuwaiti emir's power eroded, or political parties permitted.

  While significant constitutional reform has taken place in Morocco, it will take time to judge how meaningful it is in practice. The palace is unlikely to give up its power any more quickly than the pace required to get protesters off the streets. In Jordan, the delicate dynamic between ‘original’ East Bank Jordanians, who are broadly pro-monarchy and have traditionally been economically favoured by the state, and the Jordanian Palestinians who hail from the West Bank, complicates the prospects of change. But as with Morocco the system has constitutional safety valves to release pent-up pressure, and both countries are ruled by relatively young monarchs who enjoy at least some reserves of popular goodwill. Fending off discontent with expensive concessions is not possible for states with such precarious finances, and they are likely to accept greater assistance from the Gulf states, especially if they do ever join the GCC.

  But the longer term, as always, is far less certain. Oil will run out at some point, and when it does, the entire structures of some of the Gulf states will be called into question. The relative lack of visible volatility in Saudi Arabia in 2011 masked dangerous imbalances, not least a jobless and disenfranchised youth and a marginalized Shi'ite population, which carry serious risks for the future.

  In every monarchy there are bigger questions at stake. All had been within the US sphere of influence since the end of the Second World War, whether that meant security or military alliances, importing Western-style economic models, or cooperating in the ‘war on terror’. The Arab Spring was a milestone in the disintegration of that old order, opening the stage for new regional powers, including the Gulf monarchies, to fill the gap that US decline was beginning to leave behind. And for them, the victory of Islamist parties in the first post-uprising elections had its advantages.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Islamist Resurgence

  The flaws inherent in the liberal democratic system should never be used as a pretext for rejecting it, for there is no alternative out there to democracy except dictatorship. An incomplete freedom is always better than no freedom at all, and to be governed by an imperfect democratic order is better than being governed by a despotic order, that is the whims and desires of a tyrant.

  Rachid Ghannouchi, leader of Tunisia's Ennahda1

  Anger was rising in Algeria. In the slums, young men prowled the streets with nothing to do, the unemployed legions produced by one of the fastest-growing populations in the world. Economic liberalization plans aimed at boosting the economy had only bred corruption as senior officials lined their pockets at the people's expense. Black-market profiteering meant staples such as cooking oil, flour and semolina were missing from the shops. The disenfranchised younger generation was born after independence and could not remember the sacrifices the nationalists, spearheaded by the Front de Libération National (FLN), had made to rid Algeria of the French. All they could see was bribery, a monopoly on power, and their country's diminished place in the world. When jobless youths ran amok in Algiers, burning and looting FLN offices or the upmarket shops frequented by the francophone children of corrupt officials, they were demanding work, justice and dignity.2

  This was not 2011, but 1988. Alarmed, President Chadli Benjedid announced reforms, freeing up the press, allowing the formation of rival political parties, and promising elections that would ease the FLN's hold on power. Dozens of parties were formed and political debate was lively, but within three years it was clear that the Islamists, led by an umbrella organization called the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), the Islamic Salvation Front, were gaining ground. Benjedid had encouraged the Islamists in the 1980s as a bulwark against the greater threat he saw from left-wing rivals, but they now threatened to overpower the FLN itself. The leader of the FIS, Abbessi Madani, had openly stated in 1991 that any election that brought the Islamists to power would be Algeria's last.3 The group would declare an Islamic state with the Koran as its constitution and women, who emerged as the main battle line in competing visions for a new Algeria, would be banned from secondary education and placed under the control of their male relatives. In just three years, the number of veiled women had already swung from a minority to a majority in Algeria. If the Islamists did not win the elections, some FIS members were ready to take power by force.

  The FIS gained a majority in council elections in 1990 and in the following year won the first round of general elections by a landslide. With the group apparently set to take two-thirds of the assembly, enough to lead the government and amend or annul the constitution, the army forced Benjedid to resign. It effectively took control of the country and cancelled the second round of polling. Already, some FIS fighters were hiding out in the mountains, preparing for the years of war that the coup would usher in and that at its height in the late 1990s saw armed gangs massacre entire villages. Some 200,000 Algerians would be killed in the conflict. A new generation grew up knowing nothing but violence in a country ignored by a world that had lost interest since the French exit in the early 1960s.

  The tragedy that befell Algeria, blessed with hydrocarbon reserves and a diverse, enormous territory that should have made it one of the most prosperous states in Africa, was not far
from the lips of secular and religious politicians in neighbouring Tunisia in the weeks before the October 2011 elections. Its echoes could be heard in the Egyptian military's assurances to its Western allies that an Islamist government would not have control over the armed might of the state, at once a guarantee that Islamists would not take over and a limit to the democratic aspirations of Egyptians who had taken part in the uprising.4

  By the close of the year, religious parties of different stripes had won more than two-thirds of the seats in the lower house of parliament in Egypt's first elections after the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. In Tunisia, the Islamist Ennahda party took 42 per cent of seats in the new constituent assembly. In Morocco, the Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) became the single biggest group in the new parliament formed in November. In Libya, former members of the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group were prominent in the uprising and influential after it. In Syria, as elsewhere, Islamists were involved in the 2011 uprising, even though the slogans did not call for Islamic rule. In Jordan and in Bahrain, the main opposition forces were religious in outlook. In Yemen, too, the main opposition party was the Islamist-oriented Islah, or Reform, and it would likely play an important role in the post-Ali Abdullah Saleh era.

  Some commentators in the Western media were already lamenting the speed with which Arab Spring had turned to Islamist winter.5 The young secular protesters who had lit up televisions screens from London to New York earlier in the year had been hijacked, they said, by religious zealots who would now build oppressive theocracies. In the Arab Spring, some saw not just echoes of Algeria, but of the Iranian revolution which had, after all, begun with protesters of various hues coming together to remove the corrupt and authoritarian Shah. It had ended with the Islamists outmanoeuvring their former left-wing allies to declare an Islamic Republic.

  The popularity of religious parties in 2011 raised another terrifying spectre. Like the Nazis in 1932, some now argued, Islamists might embrace democracy until it brought them the desired number of seats in parliament, then they would cancel polls and declare an Islamic state, much as Madani had threatened to do in Algeria. After all, while Islamist parties differed in tone and emphasis, did they not all ultimately seek a state ruled by Islamic law, a state that would be naturally antagonistic to the West and to its models of liberal democratic rule? Might it not be better to have the old dictators back, who for all their faults were Western-friendly and not, at least, religious fundamentalists?

  The notion that a win for the Islamist political parties necessarily equals a loss for democracy is false in the context of the Arab Spring. The ultimate fallout from rising Islamist influence is far from predetermined and will differ from country to country, but another Iran or Afghanistan did not, one year on, seem in the making. Indeed, while the Western media has focused on the dangers of Islamists taking power, their twentieth-century experience has left many Arabs more wary of secular rulers trying to monopolize power than of Islamists doing the same. There are indeed Islamists, as there are nationalists, socialists and various other secularists, who do not espouse democratic values and who would seek to impose oppressive restrictions on state and society. Not all Islamists fall into this category, though, just as not all nationalists or socialists do. The religious right has proven more popular than many expected, especially in Egypt, and some religious conservatives appear to have strong financial and moral backing from the wealthy Gulf monarchies. Yet it is only by engaging with Islamist parties who win at the ballot box, and are the legitimate representatives of the voters, and by allowing them to be tainted by the same inevitable failures and criticisms that afflict every government, that post-uprising countries like Tunisia and Egypt can move beyond religion as a deciding factor in politics.

  It is also the only way that some in the West can finally move beyond an often destructive view of Islam that allows little scope for nuance, compromise or evolution of position. With so many religious groups operating in the shadows for decades, it was easy for those looking in from the outside to lump them all in the same category of uncompromising violence and repression that Al-Qaeda and the Taliban had brought to be associated with Islam. The Arab Spring has provided an opportunity to revise those views, to engage with new democratically-elected Islamists and to allow their own constituents to test their skills in bringing the dignity, prosperity and freedom that so many protesters risked their lives for in 2011.

  The Islamist Spectrum

  The very term ‘Islamist’ incorporates such a wide variety of views that it can often be misleading. ‘Islamism’ views Islam as a framework for political and social action and rule, not just personal conduct or spiritual belief. Islamists use religion to achieve political goals, but those goals can differ as significantly as the tactics used to pursue them. Those who espouse the violent overthrow of governments and the re-establishment of the lapsed Islamic caliphate across all Muslim lands are Islamists, but so are those who have reconciled Islam with democracy, accept the principle of the rotation of power within the borders of individual states, and do not seek to enforce measures that grab headlines in the West, such as the wearing of the headscarf or the banning of alcohol.

  In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Jordan and Syria the majority follow Sunni Islam, which has no clerical hierarchy or practice of emulating a religious authority that would lead to the kind of theocratic rule seen in Shi'ite Muslim Iran. An Islamic state in Sunni Islam is not a state ruled by clerics, but one ruled by laymen in accordance with Islamic law or simply in the spirit of Islamic values that emphasise family and community welfare. In any case, the interpretation of Islamic law differs significantly from one school of Islamic jurisprudence to another, and from one scholar to another. Some approaches are austere and puritanical, some seek a return to the daily practices of the earliest Muslims, but others are more flexible and dynamic and view Islam as constantly evolving and renewing to move with the times.

  ‘Islamist’ refers to so many different movements that its meaning has been eroded over the years and journalists are constantly forced to qualify the term with adjectives such as ‘moderate’ or ‘militant’ to distinguish between different groups with different visions. With Islamists now in parliaments across the region, both outside observers and people inside the region, many of whom are equally mistrustful of political Islam, increasingly need to distinguish between the radical and the moderate, the non-democratic and the democratic, the violent and the peaceful. The only way this can be done is by forcing different groups to reveal their hand, to be specific and concrete on issues from Islamic penal punishments to modern banking on which some groups have remained ambiguous in the past. Faced with the practicalities of governing day to day, Islamist groups will need to make tough decisions and will no longer be able to hide behind the abstract ideals of Islamic rule or simple slogans like ‘Islam is the solution’ that served them so well during their long years in opposition.

  Only then can the more extreme strands be marginalized and the groups that are willing to make the compromises necessitated by parliamentary politics and embrace the majority of the people's demands, lose their undeserved association with violence and repression. That process has already started in Egypt and Tunisia, where freer and fairer elections have allowed Islamists to play a much greater role in politics and, in the process, revealed the stark variations in policy and outlook among the different parties.

  Some, like Hizb al-Tahrir, which rejects democracy, were not even allowed to run in Tunisia's elections. In contrast, Tunisia's Ennahda was one of the first Islamist movements to endorse democracy. Since its inception in 1979, it has been internally governed by elections to different bodies that balance each other and allow for new ideas to rise to the top. Its founder Rachid Ghannouchi is also a leader of a school of modern Islamic political thought that advocates democracy and pluralism. Written in 1993, his Al-Hurriyat al-'Amma fid-Dawla al-Islamiyya, or Public Liberties in the Islamic State, is little known i
n the West but is one of several important contributions to the debate about the compatibility of Islam and democracy. Ghannouchi sees democracy at its most basic level as little more than a practical mechanism that can be put to use in Muslim countries to avert the rise of new dictatorships, while leaving enough scope for Islamic values to flourish.

  He opposes any government enforcement of outward markers of piety, such as the headscarf or the banning of alcohol, which he says must be left up to the individual. Ennahda has promised not to meddle with Tunisia's Personal Status Code, which bans polygamy and enshrines women's rights. It has forty-two women MPs in the constituent assembly and included in its electoral lists at least one unveiled woman in a demonstration of its more liberal credentials. Yet a democracy in Ghannouchi's conception is not the same as the secular or liberal democracies born out of European traditions. It is a democracy bound together by the spirit and cultural values of Islam that are shared by so many Tunisians.

  Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, often called ‘mainstream’ or ‘moderate’ in the media, like Ennahda, also accepts democratic principles and again interprets them through the concepts of shura and ijmaa, or consultation and consensus, by which the early Islamic community was governed. Unlike Ennahda, however, the political platform of its Freedom and Justice Party, which won the most votes in the first round of 2011 elections, clearly calls for the extension of sharia law across all aspects of life, while the concepts of equality and freedom it espouses are qualified by Islamic rules governing the role of women and minorities.

  But even the Muslim Brotherhood itself embodies a spectrum of opinion. It ranges from the older generation, wary of parliamentary politics and keen to focus on the Islamization of society through charitable and social works, to a younger generation seeking to embrace political life through elections, despite the compromises and challenges this is likely to bring. By election time in November, therefore, an ambiguity still surrounded the Brotherhood's position on issues such as whether to enforce the veil, though its efforts to encourage women to cover up have been so successful that enforcement hardly seems necessary.