Day: January 25, 2014
Rethinking Islamist Politics
Why and how have Islamist politics thrived? Thursday afternoon the Project on Middle East Political Science hosted a panel discussion analyzing Islamist politics in the Middle East. Featured speakers were François Burgat (Institut de Recherches et d’Études sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman), Thomas Hegghammer (Norwegian Defense Research Establishment), Bruce Lawrence (Duke University), and Tarek Masoud (Harvard University). Marc Lynch (George Washington University) moderated.
François Burgat: The problems that societies are facing in the Arab world today cannot be related to the fact that Islamists are or have been in power. They are linked to circumstances at the end of an authoritarian period in which societies were de-institutionalized. Islamists were not visible in the first stages of the protests. They seemed to have disappeared. Some scholars claimed “No one in the Arab world will vote for Islamists!” Three weeks later, 66% of the voters in Egypt voted for Islamists.
We are in the wrong time frame. If an Islamist government faces difficulties, that is not the end of Islamism. It is not the end of the capacity for mobilization that is specific to the Islamic reference. The fact that people are comfortable identifying as Muslims is written in a time frame that is much longer than the failure of one government in Tunisia or Egypt. The strength of the Islamic reference does not come from its being sacred, it comes from the fact that it is indigenous. Read more
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