By Khaled Neimat, Jordan Times

AMMAN – Several Islamist leaders on Saturday agreed on the need to develop their movement’s approach and tools to generate what they described as “Islamic model of governance”.

“We have made mistakes,” said Ali Abul Sukkar, president of the shura council at the Islamic Action Front (IAF), the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, at a symposium in Amman.

He was responding to remarks by Ahmad Al Abyad, member of the founding committee of Tunisia’s Ennahda Islamist party, which won 89 seats at the elections for a 217-strong constituent assembly tasked with drawing up a new constitution and appointing the caretaker government until the country calls a general election.

During the two-day symposium titled “Islamists and Governance”, Abyad said demanding power of authority in Islam is a right for each Muslim; “hence, it is a must for each of us to work for this objective and teach our children similar principles”.

At the conclusion of the first session in the symposium titled “Islamists and governance: political and intellectual analysis”, Egyptian lawyer and former member of the Egyptian parliament Subhi Saleh said: “There are no enemies for the Islamic approach and programme, but there would be fears and challenges ahead and we must work on means to overcome them.”

However, Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood shura council leader Abdul Latif Arabiyat said that revival is the name of the coming stage, criticising Islamists for spending all previous years in “hibernation” and stressing that the “Arab Spring” was the wake-up call.

During the symposium, Ghassan Abdul Haq, a professor at Philadelphia University in Jordan, cast doubt on the Islamists’ ability to succeed in power in countries with a long history of secularism,

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