The Jordanian security surrounds the demonstration of the Muslim Brotherhood in downtown Amman, Jordan, Jordan, Friday, Nov. 28, 2014 in solidarity with Palestinians people and against last week’s arrest of deputy leader of the Muslim Brotherhood Zaki Bani Irsheid.(AP Photo/Raad Adayleh)
Source: Huffington Post
By Nick Robins-Early; Associate World Editor, The Huffington Post
Every week, The WorldPost asks an expert to shed light on a topic driving headlines around the world. Today, we speak with Shadi Hamid on the current state of political Islam.
The fall of dictatorships across the Middle East and North Africa during the Arab Spring protests in 2011 paved the way for Islamist parties to join governments across the Middle East and North Africa. After decades of repression by authoritarian governments, political Islam was able to significantly expand in countries like Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco.
In many places, however, the Islamist parties’ rise was short lived. In Egypt, the rule of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi was followed by a ruthless crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood. In Tunisia, the Islamist Ennahda party lost the most recent elections.
Support for Islamist parties has not completely disappeared, however, even as the Brotherhood has been outlawed and other parties lost power.
The WorldPost spoke with Dr. Shadi Hamid about the state of political Islam today. Hamid is a Brookings Institute Fellow and the author of Temptations of Power, a book on Islamist movements.
In the wake of the so called Arab Spring protests, Islamist parties swept to power in several countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Now, with a few exceptions, that power has dissipated. What happened to those parties?
At the most basic level, Islamist parties were simply unprepared for the Arab Spring and what came with it. We have to remember that this really did come as a surprise to the actors themselves, who weren’t really planning for anything resembling revolution. It was impossible to imagine that scenario.
For Islamists in particular, it brought to the fore a lot of challenging and unanswered questions about the tension between absolute religious ideas and the mundane realities of everyday politics. Islamists have to appeal to different audiences, and it’s a very delicate balance because these different constituencies want very different things. Democracy is nice in theory, but it’s a little more difficult to swallow for many different Arab constituencies in practice.
Categories: Secularism, Sharia, Sharia Law, Shariah Law, The Muslim Times
@POTUS, @Newt Gingrich : “The state of “political” (?) Islam:”. Islam is a “faith”, in the Judaism scriptures via the Koran, it is not a political party. It is an extension of Judaism.