Just over a year ago, Saudi Arabia formally designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation. Perhaps the only surprise was that it had taken so long. The kingdom’s dislike of the Brotherhood and other political groups like it was well known, and in 2013 King Abdullah offered his congratulations when the Egyptian army removed the Brotherhood-linked government of Mohammed Morsi.
So the recent visits to Saudi Arabia of high-level delegations from Hamas – an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood – and other Brotherhood movements, such as Rachid Ghannouchi of Tunisia’s Ennahda and those from Yemen and Jordan, have been nothing short of astonishing.
The kingdom’s foreign minister, Adel Al Jubeir, has said that Hamas was there for religious purposes. But analysts believe there is more to it: after Iranian support was withdrawn because Hamas opposed Bashar Al Assad in Syria’s civil war, the group’s political leader, Khaled Meshaal, began overtures to Saudi Arabia. If these have paid off financially, there will probably be the proviso that any money goes to humanitarian and infrastructure projects in Gaza.
As a recent Al Monitor report put it: Saudi’s King Salman “prefers to abstain from unnecessary military adventures against Israel or challenges that might embarrass his country vis-à-vis the United States. Hamas has fallen into a honey trap and will have to conduct itself accordingly.”
If that is so, and if the kingdom’s seemingly greater openness to the Muslim Brotherhood in general is accompanied by similar strictures against non-essential violence, that should perhaps be cautiously welcomed. Al Monitor correctly observes: “Those wanting the movement to abandon terror have looked forward to exactly such a situation.”
It was always obvious that Islamist parties, whether linked to the Brotherhood or not, would be likely to perform strongly at the polls in many Arab countries. Hamas proved this when it won the Palestinian legislative council elections in 2006. In Egypt, it may well have been the case that moderate parties were too slow to organise, but only the naive were shocked when Morsi’s Freedom and Justice Party and the Islamist Al Nour won a combined total of 65 per cent in the 2011 Egyptian parliamentary elections. The scale of their victory may not have been expected, but a good showing was always on the cards.
The question has been whether dialogue with such parties could be fruitful, and whether they could be trusted to be responsible if handed some or all of the levers of power. The example of the Morsi government in Egypt suggested not: his administration gave every sign of wanting to skew the system so that the country enjoyed “one vote, one time”.
This was why many in the international community were at least implicitly supportive of the military intervention “to restore democracy”, as US secretary of state John Kerry put it.
But these parties are not monolithic, and manifestations of Islamism vary from country to country. Some are positioned so far to the mainstream end of the spectrum that they are often described as merely “Islamist-leaning”, such as Turkey’s AKP. With the possibility of participating in elections, others have proved far more pragmatic than expected. Ennahda in Tunisia, for instance, not only stepped down from office but gracefully accepted defeat in subsequent elections last year.
In the West, however, the very word “Islamist” is so toxic – accompanied as it is so frequently by the word “terrorism” – that any form is deemed beyond the pale. This may partly be a legacy of its association with the extremist teachings of Sayyid Qutb, who advocated the overthrow of Muslim leaders he considered apostates – even though his views had been rejected by a supreme leader of the Muslim Brotherhood as long ago as 1969.
This is dangerously reductionist. And being confronted with Islamists of a milder stripe is salutary. My own rethinking of the term began in Jakarta nearly a decade ago, when I had lunch with the then chief economist of Indonesia’s main Islamist party, PKS.
Far from being a pleasure-averse ascetic, I found him tucking into a plate of banana fritters and ice cream to sustain him before we had time to consult the menu. He happily described himself as an Islamist, but for him that meant showing that “Islam and democratic values are compatible” and desiring Islam to be “a moral code” in Indonesia.
I left somewhat bemused. If this is what Islamism means, I thought, is it really anything to be feared? Wanting politics to be inspired by the spirit of Islam is, after all, nothing terribly radical. The legal systems of nearly all Muslim-majority countries are either based on or are informed by Sharia, just as those of most western countries derive their principles from the Judaeo-Christian tradition.
So it is certainly worth asking whether the time has come for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood to play a role in bringing about a more secure and equitable Middle East, and for Islamist parties to follow suit in the wider Muslim world. Such parties are unlikely to jettison the blood-curdling clauses of their constitutions, as that would imply too sharp and too formal a rejection of their history. What they might be persuaded to do is simply to ignore them, concentrating instead on bread and butter issues and on good governance.
If there is a genuine denunciation of extremism and an acceptance of the rules of the state, there is every reason to hope that organisations still designated “terrorist” in parts of the world can move towards the mainstream. As a child I used to live near the office of one such group in Riyadh. Who now thinks of the Palestine Liberation Organisation as a “gang of terrorists”, as Israel used to call them?
Sholto Byrnes is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia
