[/caption]Well before Egyptian diplomat Tahseen Bashir, who served under Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat, dismissed most Arab states as “tribes with flags,” the region’s political banners had altered dramatically. Many of the regimes imposed in the Middle East by Britain and France after the first World War had been swept aside, replaced by nationalist strongmen like Nasser and Syria’s Hafez Al-Assad.
By the time Bashir passed away in 2002, the fashion of Arab politics was changing yet again. That year, Turkey’s Islamist Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish acronym AJ, was made the ruling party in a landslide election that repudiated decades of shadow rule by Ankara’s powerful military. A year later, the US-led ousting of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein unleashed the hawza, the underground network that sustained Iraq’s Shi’a communities through decades of state persecution and which later became the framework for that country’s most formidable political machine. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), or Ikhwan, was rebuilding itself, having survived President Hosni Mubarak’s decade-long war against Islamic militants. Within a decade, the MB and its Tunisian counterpart Ennahda (Renaissance) would be hoisting their own flag over infant Arab democracies as the region’s remaining autocrats struggled against Islamist challenges of their own.
[inset_left]“The Turkish economy has been a standout performer over the last decade, distinguishing itself as a successful hybrid of free-market and social-welfare systems.”[/inset_left]
Centuries after the gradual dissolution of the Arab empire, political Islam has restored itself. Can it endure longer than its secular predecessors? Certainly it appears to have delivered for Turkey since the AJ party leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, became prime minister in 2003. The Turkish economy has been a standout performer over the last decade, distinguishing itself as a successful hybrid of free-market and social-welfare systems. Erdogan himself has emerged as a rarity in Middle Eastern statesmanship: a respected and popular leader of a Muslim country with close (if strained) ties with Israel who can alternatively condemn and praise his co-religionist counterparts from Cairo to Tehran. No wonder many Western commentators and policymakers have promoted “the Turkish model” as something worthy of emulation by the latest generation of Arab administration.
Unfortunately, Erdogan and his apparatchiks have become heavy handed of late, jailing journalists and human rights activists on flimsy charges of sedition and leveraging the trial of a former army chief and putschist to settle old political scores. Also, the prime minister has yet to redeem his promise to replace the Turkish constitution—written by generals in the early 1980s—with one crafted by civilians. Failure to do so suggests that Turkish politics, at least with Erdogan at the helm, is not yet primed for export.
That leaves it up to the Arabs, where the biggest challenge to any new form of governance is not so much creeping authoritarianism as it is income inequality and a failing economy. A decade of neoliberal reform, most of it spoon-fed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), stimulated growth throughout the Arab world but created a predatory class among regime cronies that did as much as anything to provoke revolution and the subsequent rise of political Islam. The instability that followed has only darkened the horizons of the non-oil producing states. Tiny, heroic Tunisia, which blazed a trail for the subsequent regional convulsions, has suffered the greatest economically. Growth was flat last year and, absent a rebound in tourist arrivals and foreign direct investment, its main source of revenue, the economy is unlikely to recover. Assurances from the country’s ruling Ennahda Party that it would not impose harsh Islamist strictures was greeted with relief but has yet to inspire foreigners to help rebuild the country after decades of autocratic misrule.
Egypt, long the political and cultural conscience of the Arab world, has also failed to revive its $236 billion-a-year economy and the situation is likely to get worse before it improves. The economy is inert, the unemployment rate is well into double digits and revenue levels are dwarfed by the country’s enormous balance of payments shortfall. Negotiations between the IMF and the interim military council that runs Egypt for a $3.2 billion emergency bailout fund remain inconclusive.
The country is equally fragile politically. As the presidential ballot neared, demonstrations against the military council turned deadly, leading presidential candidates were declared ineligible by election authorities, and a suspicion formed that the generals have no intention to relinquish the power they assumed in Mubarak’s wake no matter who is president.
As Egypt’s ruling party, this is the Ikhwan’s inheritance. With its network of social services and its bourgeois sensibility, the group enjoys a broad spectrum of support from Egypt’s illiterates as well as its white-collar elites. So as not to antagonize its members and beneficiaries, Mubarak allowed the Brotherhood pockets of air in which to operate and in return it did not oppose him openly, an arrangement that worked well for both sides until the regime’s collapse last year left the group alone to sort out one of the biggest economic and political crises in Egyptian history.
At the very least, the presidential campaign provoked a serious discussion among fundamentalists about the advisability of mixing religion with politics. Supporters of the presidential candidate Aboul Monheim Abdel Fotouh, a former Ikhwanist who is ran as an independent, say a religious ministry like the Brotherhood cannot engage in politics without mortally compromising itself. (By launching its own political party, the Ikhwan has already lost some of its most promising young members along with their mentor Abdel Fotouh.) That said, Egyptians have made it clear, to paraphrase the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, that they are unconcerned about the color of the cat so long as it catches mice. It may well be that the future of political Islam, a question that has tormented historians, intellectuals, pundits and policymakers for nearly a century, will hinge on the simple matter of whether the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s most prominent and powerful Islamist group, can revive Egypt’s economy, create jobs for its youth, stimulate foreign investment, modernize its banks, rebuild its schools and infrastructure, and domesticate and professionalize its military.
Short of that, it would be only a matter of time before the next iteration of Arab governance arrives to plant its flag in the Arab world’s increasingly desiccated political landscape.
