![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/1224305143523_1.jpg\" "\\"1224305143523_1\\"")
BY FORCE of this year\u2019s Arab revolts and revolutions, activists marching under the banner of Islam are on the verge of a reckoning decades in the making: the prospect of achieving decisive power across the region has unleashed an unprecedented debate over the character of the emerging political orders they are helping to build.<\/p>\n
Few question the coming electoral success of religious activists, but as they emerge from the shadows of a long, sometimes bloody, struggle with authoritarian and ostensibly secular governments, they are confronting newly urgent questions about how to apply Islamic precepts to more open societies.<\/p>\n
In Turkey and Tunisia, culturally conservative parties founded on Islamic principles are rejecting the name \u201cIslamist\u201d to stake out what they see as a more democratic and tolerant vision.<\/p>\n
In Egypt, a similar impulse has begun to fracture the Muslim Brotherhood as a growing number of politicians and parties argue for a model inspired by Turkey, where a party with roots in political Islam has thrived in a once-adamantly secular system. Some contend that the absolute monarchy of puritanical Saudi Arabia in fact violates Islamic law.<\/p>\n
A backlash has ensued, as well, as traditionalists have flirted with time-worn Islamist ideas like imposing interest-free banking and obligatory religious taxes and censoring irreligious discourse.<\/p>\n
The debates are deep enough that many in the region believe the most important struggles may no longer be between Islamists and secularists, but rather between the Islamists themselves, pitting the more puritanical against the more liberal.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s the struggle of the future,\u201d said Azzam Tamimi, a scholar and the author of a biography of a Tunisian Islamist, Rachid Ghannouchi, whose party, Ennahda, is expected to dominate elections next month to choose an assembly to draft a constitution.<\/p>\n
The moment is as dramatic as any in recent decades in the Arab world, as autocracies crumble and suddenly vibrant parties begin building a new order, starting with elections in Tunisia in October, then Egypt in November. Though the region has witnessed examples of ventures by Islamists into politics, elections in Egypt and Tunisia, attempts in Libya to build a state from scratch and the shaping of an alternative to Syria\u2019s dictatorship are their most forceful entry yet into the region\u2019s still embryonic body politic.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is a turning point,\u201d said Emad Shahin, a scholar on Islamic law and politics at the University of Notre Dame who was in Cairo.<\/p>\n
At the centre of the debates is a new breed of politician who has risen from an Islamist milieu but accepts an essentially secular state, a current that some scholars have already taken to identifying as \u201cpost-Islamist\u201d. Its foremost exemplars are prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan\u2019s Justice and Development Party in Turkey, whose intellectuals speak of a shared experience and a common heritage with some of the younger members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and with the Ennahda party in Tunisia. Like Turkey, Tunisia faced decades of a state-enforced secularism that never completely reconciled itself with a conservative population.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey feel at home with each other,\u201d said Cengiz Candar, an Arabic-speaking Turkish columnist. \u201cIt\u2019s similar terms of reference, and they can easily communicate with them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ghannouchi has suggested a common ambition, proposing what some say Erdogan\u2019s party has managed to achieve: a prosperous, democratic Muslim state, led by a party that is deeply religious but operates within a system that is supposed to protect liberties.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the Islamic spectrum goes from bin Laden to Erdogan, which of them is Islam?\u201d Ghannouchi asked in a recent debate with a secular critic. \u201cWhy are we put in the same place as a model that is far from our thought, like the Taliban or the Saudi model, while there are other successful Islamic models that are close to us, like the Turkish, the Malaysian and the Indonesian models, models that combine Islam and modernity?\u201d<\/p>\n
In Libya, Ali Sallabi, the most important Islamist political leader, cites Ghannouchi as a major influence. Abdel Moneim Abou el-Fotouh, a former Muslim Brotherhood leader running for president in Egypt, has joined several breakaway political parties in arguing that the state should avoid interpreting or enforcing Islamic law, regulating religious taxes or barring a person from running for president based on gender or religion.<\/p>\n
A party formed by three leaders of the Brotherhood\u2019s youth wing says that while Egypt shares a common Arab and Islamic culture with the region, its emerging political system should ensure protections of individual freedoms as robust as the West\u2019s. One of them, Islam Lotfy, argues that the strictly religious kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where the Koran is ostensibly the constitution, was less Islamist than Turkey. \u201cIt is not Islamist; it is dictatorship,\u201d said Lotfy, who was recently expelled from the Brotherhood for starting the new party.<\/p>\n
Egypt\u2019s Centre Party, a group that struggled for 16 years to win a licence from the ousted government, may go furthest here in elaborating the notion of post-Islamism. Its founder, Abul-Ela Madi, has long sought to mediate between religious and liberal forces, even coming up with a set of shared principles last month. Like the Ennahda party in Tunisia, he disavows the term \u201cIslamist\u201d and, like other progressive Islamic activists, he describes his group as Egypt\u2019s closest equivalent to Erdogan\u2019s \u201cneither secular nor Islamist. We\u2019re in between.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is often said in Turkey that its political system, until recently dominated by the military, moderated Islamic currents there. Lotfy says he hopes that Egyptian Islamists will undergo a similar, election-driven evolution. But, compared with Turkey, the stakes of the debates may be even higher in the Arab world, where divided and weak liberal currents pale before the organisation and popularity of Islamic activists.<\/p>\n
In Syria, debates rage among activists over whether a civil or Islamic state should follow the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, if he falls. The emergence in Egypt, Tunisia and Syria of Salafists, the most inflexible currents in political Islam, is one of the most striking political developments. (\u201cThe Koran is our constitution,\u201d goes one of their sayings.)<\/p>\n
And the most powerful current in Egypt, still represented by the Muslim Brotherhood, has stubbornly resisted some of the changes in discourse. When Erdogan expressed hope for \u201ca secular state in Egypt\u201d, meaning, he explained, a state equidistant from all faiths, Brotherhood leaders immediately lashed out, saying that Erdogan\u2019s Turkey offered no model for either Egypt or its Islamists.<\/p>\n
A Brotherhood spokesman, Mahmoud Ghozlan, accused Turkey of violating Islamic law by failing to criminalise adultery. \u201cIn the secularist system, this is accepted, and the laws protect the adulterer,\u201d he said, \u201cBut in the Shariah law this is a crime.\u201d<\/p>\n
As recently as 2007, a prototype Brotherhood platform sought to bar women or Christians from serving as Egypt\u2019s president and called for a panel of religious scholars to advise on the compliance of any legislation with Islamic law. The group has never disavowed the document. Its rhetoric of Islam\u2019s long tolerance of minorities often sounds condescending to Egypt\u2019s Christian minority, which wants to be afforded equal citizenship, not special protections.<\/p>\n
Indeed, Tamimi, the scholar, argued that some mainstream groups like the Brotherhood were feeling the tug of their increasingly assertive conservative constituencies, which still relentlessly call for censorship and interest-free banking.<\/p>\n
\u201cIs democracy the voice of the majority?\u201d asks Mohammed Nadi, a 26-year-old student at a recent Salafist protest in Cairo. \u201cWe as Islamists are the majority. Why do they want to impose on us the views of the minorities \u2013 the liberals and the secularists? That\u2019s all I want to know.\u201d \u2013 ( New York Times<\/em>\u00a0)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ANTHONY SHADID and DAVID D KIRKPATRICK ANALYSIS\u00a0: Puritanical Islamists are vying with more liberal ones to impose their vision of the world on the Middle East BY FORCE of this year\u2019s Arab revolts and revolutions, activists marching under the banner of Islam are on the verge of a reckoning decades in the making: the prospect […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":44655,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2938],"tags":[5983],"class_list":["post-44654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle-east-middle-east-regions","tag-arab-spring"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44654\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}