Voting has begun in the
Palestinian elections. It's not clear how well Hamas -
the Arabic acronym stands for Movement of
Islamic Resistance - will do, but opinion polls in
the Palestinian territories show the Islamic
organization pulling neck and neck with the ruling
Fatah Party. This is so even though Fatah
strategists have plastered the territories with
posters of Marwan Barghouti, the popular young
leader who is serving five life sentences for
murder in an Israeli jail.
This is but the
latest manifestation of the rise of political
Islam in
the
electoral politics of the Middle East, a
development that - despite the Bush
administration's endless promotion of democratic
reform in the region - is causing deep worry among
top policymakers in Washington.
Last
year began with Islamist candidates winning most of
the seats in the first very limited municipal
polls in Saudi Arabia and ended with the
Iraqi religious parties - both Shi'ite and Sunni
- performing handsomely in last month's parliamentary
elections. The official Iraqi results, announced
on Saturday, showed the Shi'ite United Iraqi
Alliance winning almost 80% of the seats that
should go to the majority Shi'ite community.
Likewise, the Islamic Iraq Party won 80% of the
places to which the Sunni minority should be
entitled.
In between these polls, in a
general election held last summer, Hezbollah
emerged as the preeminent representative of
Lebanese Shi'ites, the country's largest sectarian
group (which is grossly underrepresented in
parliament). And in the first election for the
legislative assembly not flagrantly rigged by
Hosni Mubarak's regime in Egypt, the Muslim
Brotherhood registered about a 60% success rate by
winning 88 out of the 150 seats it contested. The
Brotherhood certainly could have won many more,
but its leadership deliberately decided to contest
only a minority of seats in order not to provoke
the regime of Egypt's pro-American president and
so create a situation in which he might be likely
to strike out indiscriminately against the
opposition.
Put all of this together and
you have what looks like a single phenomenon
sweeping the region. However, focus on these
developments one by one and what you see is that
the reasons for Islamist advances are not only
different in each case but particular to each
country.
Take Iraq. History shows that
when an ethnic, racial or social group is
persecuted or overly oppressed, it tends to turn
to religion to find solace. In the Americas, this
was true, for instance, of the Africans brought in
as slaves. It is not accidental that today
African-Americans are still more religious than
white Americans.
Once Iraq became part of
the (Sunni) Ottoman Empire in 1638, Shi'ites were
persecuted and discriminated against. Even after
the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, as King
Faisal was installed by the British as Iraq's
ruler, little changed. He was Sunni, as were the
leaders of the Ba'ath Party that followed him to
power. Mosque and religion became the last resort
of Iraqi Shi'ites. Once the Ba'ath Party was
pulverized in the wake of the Bush
administration's invasion, the Shi'ite religious
network emerged as the most cohesive and efficient
organization in the country - and remains so
today.
In the late 1970s, following the
fall of the secular regime of the Shah, Iran
witnessed a similar phenomenon. As for the Sunnis,
that long-dominant minority, 12 years of United
Nations economic sanctions hurt them as badly as
non-Sunni Iraqis. Increased misery and growing
impoverishment led the Sunni masses, too, to turn
to Islam for consolation and support. So it is not
surprising that once Sunnis decided to participate
in the electoral process, most of them favored the
Iraqi Islamic Party.
There is no evidence
to suggest that, under Saddam Hussein, Iraqis were
overwhelmingly secular to begin with. There were
then no public opinion polls to discover the
actual views of the people. The Arab Ba'ath
Socialist Party was itself secular in the sense
that one of its three founders, Michel Aflaq, the
ideological guru of Saddam, was a Christian who
moved from Beirut to Baghdad and died there in
1989.
Far more reliable, when it comes to
the state of public opinion, is the confidential
poll conducted in late July 2004 for the
International Republican Institute, an offshoot of
the US Republican Party, and leaked to the media
that September: seven out of 10 respondents said
the Sharia, or Islamic law, should be the "sole
basis" of Iraqi laws, and the same proportion -
70% - preferred to live in a "religious state";
only 23% opted for a secular one. The two
elections since then have only underlined the
accuracy of this poll.
Egypt is the
country where the Muslim Brotherhood was first
established in 1928. By inflicting a swift and
humiliating defeat on an Egypt ruled by president
Gamal Abdul Nasser, a man wedded to "Arab
socialism", Israel in June 1967 delivered a
near-fatal blow to the hopes for the development
of secular Arab nationalism in the region. In that
hour of their downfall most Egyptians attributed
the Israeli victory to Jewish devotion to their
religion and, in a similar spirit, turned to Islam
for their own spiritual succor. It was at that
point that the Muslim Brotherhood, though still an
outlawed organization, began gaining popularity.
With Anwar Sadat (known to have been
sympathetic to the Brotherhood earlier in his
life) succeeding Nasser as president in 1970,
pressure on the Brotherhood eased for a while. In
more recent years, the failure of Mubarak's rule
to narrow the gap between a tiny, wealthy elite
and the country's impoverished masses has provided
the Brotherhood with an ever-richer soil in which
to plant its utopian and increasingly appealing
slogan, "Islam is the solution."
Today, it
is fair to say that the failure of both Arab
socialism and American-style capitalism to deliver
the goods to the bulk of the population, leaves a
probable majority of Egyptians ready to try the
"third way" of Islam.
The Palestinian case
is altogether different. Israel's 38-year-long
military occupation, with its devastating impact
on the everyday lives of the occupied, has spawned
politics that have no parallel elsewhere in the
Arab world. Its salient features include: powerful
tensions between local and long-exiled leaders;
high political consciousness; a lack of distance
between followers and leaders of a sort not found
in long-established states and regimes; and a
turning to religion for solace.
The ruling
Fatah movement suffers from tensions between local
leaders and those who spent many years abroad
before returning after the 1993 Oslo Accords (part
of the peace process that tried to resolve the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict). The leadership of
Hamas, on the other hand, is almost wholly local.
Because the Palestinian state is not fully
formed, followers in the ranks of such parties are
able to exercise direct pressure on the
leadership. As the governing party, which has
proved corrupt and inept in administering the
Palestinian entity, Fatah has seen its standing
wane. By contrast, Hamas has a history of
providing free social services to the needy and is
not tainted with a history of corruption and
cronyism.
In short, while political Islam
is ascendant in the emerging electoral politics of
the Middle East, the reasons for its successes are
varied and specific to each country. This is not a
case of "one size fits all". That is the least
that those who mold public opinion in the US ought
to grasp.
As for the policymakers in the
Bush administration, they will, sooner or later,
have to face reality and deal with organizations
such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, as they
have found themselves forced to play ball with the
religious parties in an Iraq occupied by their
troops.
Dilip Hiro is the author
of Secrets and Lies: Operation Iraqi Freedom
and After and The Iranian Labyrinth:
Journeys Through Theocratic Iran and Its Furies,
both published by Nation Books.
