Islamist Phase of Arab Awakening Failed
The failure of Islamism in power and the key challenges facing the new rulers in Arab societies that saw uprisings and regime changes are now emerging.
In an article titled “The Arab Awakening at Two: Facebook to Faith Book,” written on the second anniversary of the successful popular uprising in Tunisia and Egypt (Jan. 28, 2013), I argued why the Islamists in the two countries were able to grab power via the ballots — either alone or in an alliance they control. The post-authoritarian phase saw the emergence of Islamist-dominated or influenced regimes. The same could be said also about Libya, where Islamism was tempered by the strong tribal and regional factors. In Syria, the key most-influential forces in the opposition fighting the regime are different Islamist groups including the Muslim Brotherhood, many Salafist currents and different factions of the al-Qaeda family.
That Islamism reached power was no surprise for many reasons. First, it is about being the only organized force with a strong ideological motivation and an iron discipline. Second, it is about the attractiveness of its message and the promises of better life it carries. In fact, this attractiveness stems from the fact that Arab societies are undergoing great inequalities and humiliation and witnessing the re-emergence of religious conservatism and identity revivalism under different religious forms. Third, the Muslim Brotherhood movements have strong financial and organizational capabilities.
All these elements empower the Muslim Brotherhood to perform efficiently in an almost political and organizational desert imposed by the former regimes. Yet, current events in Egypt and Tunisia show that the Islamist phase of the second Arab awakening — a term I prefer to "Arab Spring" — brought by the popular uprising, was a failure.
An illiberal democratization process that was initiated under the Islamist influence led to great opposition from all those who believed that the age of liberty started after the fall of dictatorship. Such liberty or freedom, not to be defined or shaped in a narrow, selective way by one party — the Muslim Brotherhood in this case — in the name of an ideological superiority which the party believes to defend, promote and impose in different ways.
