Breakdown of the grand bargain IV
By Shahid Javed Burki
Published: October 24, 2011
The breakdown of the grand bargain between the West and the Middle East means that the countries that have managed to get rid of the old and established order are beginning with a clean slate. In designing new political structures and putting into place new economic models, they will have to define their approach towards a number of elements that were once part of the grand bargain. The first is the nature of the political system and that includes the role of Islam in politics. The second is the role of the state, which means the relationship between those who govern and over whom they govern.
In the old and now discarded system, Islam was kept out of politics. The West, which was the other party in the grand design, was not comfortable with the influence Islam could exercise on politics. For instance, France encouraged the Algerian establishment not to give up power to an Islamic party that had clearly won in the elections to the national legislature. Similarly, the United States and most of its European allies have refused to accept the political legitimacy of Hamas in Palestine in spite of that party’s overwhelming triumph in electoral politics. That won’t be possible in the new order that is now emerging in the countries that have freed themselves of authoritarian rule and will increasingly detach themselves from the West.
But bringing Islam into politics does not mean making a political system Islamic. As Humeira Iqtidar, a Pakistani scholar who teaches in London, points out in her new book, the differences between what can be called Islamists, Islamic revivalists, and Islamic fundamentalists should be understood in order to fully comprehend what is happening in most of the Islamic world. For her, Islamist movements are concerned with introducing broad Islamic principles and values into the working of the state by using democratic processes. That has happened in Turkey and will probably happen in many other parts of the Muslim world. Reformist Islam, as the term suggests, means interpreting the religion so that it does not come into serious conflict with modern ways. Those who can be called Islamic fundamentalists are people who belong to, provide support to and sympathise with movements such as al Qaeda. They interpret the religion in its most fundamentalist sense. But as Raza Aslan, the American-Iranian scholar of Islam, points out in his book Cosmic Wars, fundamentalism is not unique to Islam. Similar movements have captured political space in Christian and Jewish societies. The rampage in Oslo by Andres Behring Breivik, the Norwegian religious activist, is an example of a fundamentalist action in a non-Muslim society.
The post-grand bargain societies in the Middle East are now deeply engaged in this debate as they begin the task of providing them with new political structures.
This debate has been picked up by Islamic activists in Egypt, another country engaged in a similar exercise. Abdel Moneim Abou el-Fotouh, a former Muslim brotherhood leader who is a candidate for the country’s presidency, has joined several breakaway political parties in suggesting that “the state should avoid interpreting Islam or enforcing Islamic law, regulating religious texts or barring a person from running for president based on gender or religion”. The debate in the post-Arab Spring world, therefore, is not about how much influence Islam should have on statecraft. The issue is whether those who are devout can be accommodated within policymaking circles.
Even though it is still too early to predict what will be the political order that will take shape in the countries that were directly affected by the Arab Spring, one thing is clear. Islam in politics will no longer be a taboo subject. It will be accommodated in some form other in the political lives of these nations.
What kind of state will emerge once the Arab world, unsettled by recent events, finds its political feet? There are no working models in the Arab world. The only one the emerging leadership can look to is Turkey which, in many remarkable ways, has been able to combine Islam with modernity.
Source: Breakdown of Grand Bargain IV