When the Arab uprisings began five years ago, the prevailing narrative in the West, and even in some parts of the Middle East, was that Islamists would benefit. While they did make gains early on, today the picture is more or less one of failure. Almost nowhere have Islamists offered a viable model of governance.
This realisation was most pronounced in two countries, Egypt and Tunisia, where Islamist parties took on leading roles in the political transitions away from authoritarian rule. Yet in Egypt, where a president was elected from the Muslim Brotherhood, the experience was so disastrous and divisive that many Egyptians backed the military’s removal of Mohammed Morsi.
In Tunisia, the Islamist Ennahda Party emerged in 2011 as the largest single party in the Constituent Assembly. A party member, Hamadi Jebali, was appointed prime minister. However, Ennahda did not seek to Islamise life in Tunisia, and the experience of Mr Morsi was sobering. In January 2014, to end growing polarisation and facilitate the drafting of a constitution, another prime minister from the party, Ali Laarayedh, resigned in favour of a technocratic government.
In neither Egypt nor Tunisia was opposition to leading Islamist parties a sign of the abandonment of Islam. Rather, it reflected popular refusal to make religion the central foundation of the state. While religion is widespread in both countries, there is also a strong secularist tradition in their societies that Islamists mistakenly thought they could ignore.
In Libya and Syria the situation has been different. The anarchy of war, in addition to whatever else it did, made armed groups who claimed to be speaking in the name of Islam complicit in the destruction of the two countries. It wasn’t so much that they governed badly as that they did not govern at all, often using Salafism mainly as an instrument to secure funding from donors in that Gulf states.
In Iraq and Syria, violent extremist groups such as ISIL and Jabhat Al Nusra were gaining ground and profiting from the vacuum created by war. While ISIL has sought to create a transnational “caliphate”, Jabhat Al Nusra’s aims have been, for now, more focused on defeating Bashar Al Assad’s regime.
Jabhat Al Nusra’s relative popularity among supporters of the Syrian opposition has much more to do with this factor – its success in fighting the Syrian regime – than with ideology. Groups such as ISIL and Al Qaeda have little real appeal among wide swaths of the multifaceted Syrian society. Syrian history has always been more about pluralism and admixtures than adherence to the ideal of the one instead of the many.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that the perception was that Sunni communities were more likely to follow intolerant Islamists than the Shia community. Yet after years of regional turmoil, it is Shia Islamist groups who have thrived, while Sunni communities have gone furthest in challenging, or questioning, Islamist projects.
In Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen, sectarian Shia armed groups who have adopted a religious identity continue to play destabilising roles. While they have not sought to impose Islamic doctrine on all, they have frequently done so in areas under their control.
This reality shows how ambiguous the relationship has been between Shia groups and their states. Iraq and Lebanon have mixed societies, so the imposition of Islamic law on all is difficult. Not only do both countries have significant non-Muslim, or non-Arab, minorities that would resist such an undertaking, but disagreements among Muslims over the nature of an Islamic state and its references would be profound.
That is why in many parts of the Arab world there is no impetus to impose an Islamic state. The region suffers from a lack of confidence in those governing them, and in the past five years almost nowhere have Islamists shown more competence in governing than secular dictatorships. Only in Tunisia did Islamists display modesty by agreeing to compromise.
As Islamists look at the region, they can take no pride in the wasteland it has become. Yet the chaos is not due to an absence of Islam or a refusal to embrace religion; in many cases Islamist parties and armed groups have been involved in augmenting the disorder. To many Arabs while secular nationalist rule brought mainly repression, recent years have shown that there is no true Islamist alternative. The region is at an impasse.
Western societies must grasp these realities. The simplistic view is that Muslim societies and Islam are monolithic, unequivocally religious and invariably threatening to them. There is no appreciation of the traumas that have torn the region apart, no sense of how this might have deeply altered the outlook towards Islamist groups and their claims to rule successfully.
The history of the Middle East is now being written by its own peoples. Their paragon is neither Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi nor Bashar Al Assad. As western populists rouse the crowds, their ignoring of such dynamics displays grave dishonesty.
Michael Young is opinion editor of The Daily Star in Beirut
On Twitter: @BeirutCalling
