Is Political Islam on the Decline in the Middle East?
Gareth Smyth*
Posted by admin on Jul 18, 2013 | Leave a Comment | Print
A recently married young couple returning from Hajj to their village in Iran's Loristan province, 2007 (Photo Credit: Gareth Smyth)
A recently married young couple returning from Hajj to their village in Iran’s Loristan province, 2007
(Photo Credit: Gareth Smyth)
Reports of political Islam’s death are greatly exaggerated.
In a recent article for the Inter Press Service, Washington-based journalist Barbara Slavin proclaimed the “come-uppance” of political Islam and trumpeted its declining influence and diminishing popularity in the Middle East. “Islam is not the solution,” Slavin proclaimed, declaring the rise and success of secularism in the region to be inevitable.
Given the numbers of volunteer Muslim jihadis fighting in Syria, a graphic example of the long-term rise of militant Islam across the Middle East, this was an extraordinary claim from someone who is also a senior fellow and “Iran specialist” at the Atlantic Council, which describes itself as a “think tank” aiming to “promote constructive US leadership and engagement in international affairs.”
If the demise of political Islam were real, the United States would have no need to engage in any way with disparate groups like Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, or the Afghan Taliban. The Islamic Republic of Iran would be irrelevant. Even Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party could be considered dead and buried. Hizbollah could just be ignored.
Slavin’s effective epitaph for political Islam is based on two main pillars: the Egyptian army’s removal of President Mohammed Morsi a year after he was elected; and the purported demise of religious sentiment and adherence in Iran, where, according to Slavin, “the 1979 Islamic Revolution died years ago.” Iran, in her estimation, is “now one of the least religious countries in the Middle East.”
For Slavin, Iran’s Islamic Republic is hanging on only through the machinations of the rahbar (‘leader’), Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in the face of overwhelming public rejection. Hence, before Iran’s June presidential election, including an article just four days before the poll, Slavin predicted “victory for the camp of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei but with a relatively low turnout.”
But facts, as it turned out, are stubborn things. Voter turnout was put at over 72%, somewhat higher than the 57.5% turnout in the 2012 U.S. presidential election, and Iran’s new president, with nearly 51% of votes in a final field of six, was a cleric and pragmatic conservative, Hassan Rouhani, rather than Ayatollah Khamenei’s supposed preferences.
In subsequently penning her epitaph for political Islam, and Iran’s Islamic Republic in particular, Slavin gave no explanation as to why her pre-poll predictions had been so off the mark. Especially shocking to her was Rouhani’s triumph in the face of her evidence-free assessment that “clerics are notoriously unpopular among the citizens of the Islamic Republic.” In fact, four out of the five last Iranian presidents – all except Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – have been clerics. Behind faulty analysis there is often a set of bogus assumptions.
Central to these, Iran simply does not show the absence of religion Slavin claims. Since Saddam’s fall in 2003, hundreds of thousands of devout Shia Muslims have risked their lives to visit the holy Shia cities in Iraq, even when the Iranian authorities closed the border because Sunni extremists were targeting pilgrims.
Slavin writes that, in Iran, “Muslim holidays such as Ramadan are barely observed.” While she appears to be confusing the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast, with the holiday celebration of Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the month, this just compounds the error. Islamic festivals are enthusiastically embraced in Iran alongside pre-Islamic ones like Nowruz (new year). Often Islamic and pre-Islamic practices are mixed to the extent that most Iranians simply do not see or comprehend the ‘contradiction’ imagined by many outside observers. It is unclear how Slavin has reached her conclusion.
Iranian Zourkhaneh in the city of Yazd, 2006 (Photo Credit: Gareth Smyth)
Iranian Zourkhaneh in the city of Yazd, 2006
(Photo Credit: Gareth Smyth)
In my years in Iran, I was sometimes given a brand new banknote as a Nowruz gift and advised to take it home and place it in my holy Quran. And while the Iranian solar year is different to the lunar Islamic year – it has always amazed me how Iranians routinely think simultaneously in three calendars – it is numbered from the year of the Prophet Mohammad’s migration to Medina.
Visit a zourkhaneh (‘house of strength,’ a traditional gymnasium) in Iran and one will find a way of life encompassing humility and bravery, laced with recitations of the nationalist poetry of Ferdowsi as well as evocations of Imam Ali, the first Shia imam and revered, among other things, as a wrestler.
Neither does polling evidence – such as it is – support the idea that Iranians favor anything that might be called ‘secularism.’ In the run-up to June’s presidential election, a survey released by the U.S.-based Pew Research Center found that 40% of Iranians thought religious figures should play a “large role” in politics, and 26% that they should have “some influence,” while 83% favored the “use of sharia, or Islamic law.”
It is a common mistake of Western analysts to brush aside inconvenient facts while transferring their own presumptions onto Middle Eastern societies. It is a surprisingly common belief, rampant at the time of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and revived as the ‘Arab Spring’ broke out in December 2010, that Middle Easterners are ‘secularists’ at heart, as deep down everyone in the world aspires to live like Americans. As a result, movements with different aspirations – including political Islam – are assumed to be ephemeral, either home to the deluded or the product of some devious manipulation. Sooner or later, goes the logic, secularists must triumph.
But these presumptions about ‘secularism’ have proved faulty again and again. After the 2003 invasion of Iraq was justified by some as a step toward Western-style democracy, many Western analysts championed Iraqi politicians Adnan Pachachi and then Iyyad Allawi as secularists, yet neither could consistently defeat Islamic parties in elections. Similarly, the most secular of the Palestinian factions, Fatah, has long lost its dominant status in Palestinian politics.
There is food for thought in the very fact that the term ‘secular’ has been applied to groups as diverse as Allawi’s Iraqi National Accord, Lebanon’s Amal, the Syrian Baath party and the Syrian Social Nationalists, the Turkish military, and Egypt’s Wafd party. In truth, however, the term ‘secular,’ given its modern meaning during and after the French Revolution, has no obvious application in the Middle East, where political conflict generally takes other forms and guises than those of modern Europe or the United States. The term ‘political Islam’ too covers such a wide variety of tendencies that disputes, including violent ones, can and do take place under its broad roof.
So, where Middle Eastern secularists are absent or ineffective, where do the Western advocates of ‘secularism’ end up? Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Hence, Slavin turns to the Egyptian army dealing a deathblow to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Still, setbacks and disillusionment for an Islamist party hardly amount to the demise of political Islam as a whole; for instance, the military coup that overthrew Morsi was supported by competing Islamist factions, including Egypt’s largest Salafist party, Al Nour, which came in second to the Muslim Brotherhood in last year’s elections.
Meanwhile, the United States has long maintained a firm alliance with Saudi Arabia, which since the late 1970s has funded militant Islam across the region and beyond, despite being one of the least ‘secular’ states in the world. Notably, Saudi Arabia recently led the way in arranging an immediate $12 billion aid package from Gulf states for the new military-imposed regime in Egypt.
Oddly, then, the Middle East turns out to be rather like everywhere else. Rather than representing a battle between secularism and Islam, politics is the art of the possible, unfolding in specific circumstances. As elsewhere, violence begets violence; injustice produces opposition; ignorance leads to mistakes.
All too often, false assumptions and wishful thinking breed an arrogance that comes before a fall.
*From 2003 to 2007, Gareth Smyth was the chief correspondent in the Tehran bureau of the Financial Times and has reported from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran since 1992.
Gareth Smyth*
Posted by admin on Jul 18, 2013 | Leave a Comment | Print
A recently married young couple returning from Hajj to their village in Iran's Loristan province, 2007 (Photo Credit: Gareth Smyth)
A recently married young couple returning from Hajj to their village in Iran’s Loristan province, 2007
(Photo Credit: Gareth Smyth)
Reports of political Islam’s death are greatly exaggerated.
In a recent article for the Inter Press Service, Washington-based journalist Barbara Slavin proclaimed the “come-uppance” of political Islam and trumpeted its declining influence and diminishing popularity in the Middle East. “Islam is not the solution,” Slavin proclaimed, declaring the rise and success of secularism in the region to be inevitable.
Given the numbers of volunteer Muslim jihadis fighting in Syria, a graphic example of the long-term rise of militant Islam across the Middle East, this was an extraordinary claim from someone who is also a senior fellow and “Iran specialist” at the Atlantic Council, which describes itself as a “think tank” aiming to “promote constructive US leadership and engagement in international affairs.”
If the demise of political Islam were real, the United States would have no need to engage in any way with disparate groups like Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, or the Afghan Taliban. The Islamic Republic of Iran would be irrelevant. Even Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party could be considered dead and buried. Hizbollah could just be ignored.
Slavin’s effective epitaph for political Islam is based on two main pillars: the Egyptian army’s removal of President Mohammed Morsi a year after he was elected; and the purported demise of religious sentiment and adherence in Iran, where, according to Slavin, “the 1979 Islamic Revolution died years ago.” Iran, in her estimation, is “now one of the least religious countries in the Middle East.”
For Slavin, Iran’s Islamic Republic is hanging on only through the machinations of the rahbar (‘leader’), Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in the face of overwhelming public rejection. Hence, before Iran’s June presidential election, including an article just four days before the poll, Slavin predicted “victory for the camp of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei but with a relatively low turnout.”
But facts, as it turned out, are stubborn things. Voter turnout was put at over 72%, somewhat higher than the 57.5% turnout in the 2012 U.S. presidential election, and Iran’s new president, with nearly 51% of votes in a final field of six, was a cleric and pragmatic conservative, Hassan Rouhani, rather than Ayatollah Khamenei’s supposed preferences.
In subsequently penning her epitaph for political Islam, and Iran’s Islamic Republic in particular, Slavin gave no explanation as to why her pre-poll predictions had been so off the mark. Especially shocking to her was Rouhani’s triumph in the face of her evidence-free assessment that “clerics are notoriously unpopular among the citizens of the Islamic Republic.” In fact, four out of the five last Iranian presidents – all except Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – have been clerics. Behind faulty analysis there is often a set of bogus assumptions.
Central to these, Iran simply does not show the absence of religion Slavin claims. Since Saddam’s fall in 2003, hundreds of thousands of devout Shia Muslims have risked their lives to visit the holy Shia cities in Iraq, even when the Iranian authorities closed the border because Sunni extremists were targeting pilgrims.
Slavin writes that, in Iran, “Muslim holidays such as Ramadan are barely observed.” While she appears to be confusing the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast, with the holiday celebration of Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the month, this just compounds the error. Islamic festivals are enthusiastically embraced in Iran alongside pre-Islamic ones like Nowruz (new year). Often Islamic and pre-Islamic practices are mixed to the extent that most Iranians simply do not see or comprehend the ‘contradiction’ imagined by many outside observers. It is unclear how Slavin has reached her conclusion.
Iranian Zourkhaneh in the city of Yazd, 2006 (Photo Credit: Gareth Smyth)
Iranian Zourkhaneh in the city of Yazd, 2006
(Photo Credit: Gareth Smyth)
In my years in Iran, I was sometimes given a brand new banknote as a Nowruz gift and advised to take it home and place it in my holy Quran. And while the Iranian solar year is different to the lunar Islamic year – it has always amazed me how Iranians routinely think simultaneously in three calendars – it is numbered from the year of the Prophet Mohammad’s migration to Medina.
Visit a zourkhaneh (‘house of strength,’ a traditional gymnasium) in Iran and one will find a way of life encompassing humility and bravery, laced with recitations of the nationalist poetry of Ferdowsi as well as evocations of Imam Ali, the first Shia imam and revered, among other things, as a wrestler.
Neither does polling evidence – such as it is – support the idea that Iranians favor anything that might be called ‘secularism.’ In the run-up to June’s presidential election, a survey released by the U.S.-based Pew Research Center found that 40% of Iranians thought religious figures should play a “large role” in politics, and 26% that they should have “some influence,” while 83% favored the “use of sharia, or Islamic law.”
It is a common mistake of Western analysts to brush aside inconvenient facts while transferring their own presumptions onto Middle Eastern societies. It is a surprisingly common belief, rampant at the time of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and revived as the ‘Arab Spring’ broke out in December 2010, that Middle Easterners are ‘secularists’ at heart, as deep down everyone in the world aspires to live like Americans. As a result, movements with different aspirations – including political Islam – are assumed to be ephemeral, either home to the deluded or the product of some devious manipulation. Sooner or later, goes the logic, secularists must triumph.
But these presumptions about ‘secularism’ have proved faulty again and again. After the 2003 invasion of Iraq was justified by some as a step toward Western-style democracy, many Western analysts championed Iraqi politicians Adnan Pachachi and then Iyyad Allawi as secularists, yet neither could consistently defeat Islamic parties in elections. Similarly, the most secular of the Palestinian factions, Fatah, has long lost its dominant status in Palestinian politics.
There is food for thought in the very fact that the term ‘secular’ has been applied to groups as diverse as Allawi’s Iraqi National Accord, Lebanon’s Amal, the Syrian Baath party and the Syrian Social Nationalists, the Turkish military, and Egypt’s Wafd party. In truth, however, the term ‘secular,’ given its modern meaning during and after the French Revolution, has no obvious application in the Middle East, where political conflict generally takes other forms and guises than those of modern Europe or the United States. The term ‘political Islam’ too covers such a wide variety of tendencies that disputes, including violent ones, can and do take place under its broad roof.
So, where Middle Eastern secularists are absent or ineffective, where do the Western advocates of ‘secularism’ end up? Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Hence, Slavin turns to the Egyptian army dealing a deathblow to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Still, setbacks and disillusionment for an Islamist party hardly amount to the demise of political Islam as a whole; for instance, the military coup that overthrew Morsi was supported by competing Islamist factions, including Egypt’s largest Salafist party, Al Nour, which came in second to the Muslim Brotherhood in last year’s elections.
Meanwhile, the United States has long maintained a firm alliance with Saudi Arabia, which since the late 1970s has funded militant Islam across the region and beyond, despite being one of the least ‘secular’ states in the world. Notably, Saudi Arabia recently led the way in arranging an immediate $12 billion aid package from Gulf states for the new military-imposed regime in Egypt.
Oddly, then, the Middle East turns out to be rather like everywhere else. Rather than representing a battle between secularism and Islam, politics is the art of the possible, unfolding in specific circumstances. As elsewhere, violence begets violence; injustice produces opposition; ignorance leads to mistakes.
All too often, false assumptions and wishful thinking breed an arrogance that comes before a fall.
*From 2003 to 2007, Gareth Smyth was the chief correspondent in the Tehran bureau of the Financial Times and has reported from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran since 1992.
