Islam and the Arab Spring

With elections being held in Tunisia and Egypt, sites of successful popular uprisings which overthrew dictators, it is interesting to note the role of Islam in the Arab Spring movement. The actual protests that made up the Arab Spring in these countries were remarkable in that the Islamists had virtually no role in them. They were popular uprisings by people whose frustration with dictatorship finally boiled over. The fact that the Islamists were not involved is particularly striking because Islamism has for the last 20 years or so been the primary social force opposing the dictatorships. Most of these dictatorships had successfully eliminated, through murder, torture, and imprisonment the various left wing movements (with US help of course) back during the Cold War, thus leaving Islam as the only social opposition.

The fact that the protests were not organized by the Islamists, and that the Islamists did not join in and try to hijack the protests is then one of the most interesting aspects of the whole Arab Spring phenomena. The reason that the Islamists were not getting involved is precisely because Islam, like all religions, is by nature anti-political. The street protests, which were disorderly and turbulent as all good popular uprisings are, were a fundamental outbreak of politics. Islamism is deeply suspicious to the point of being hostile to anything political, and thus refrained from taking part.

Now that the popular uprisings in these two countries are over, and the political outbreak has fallen back into the regular situation of anti-political statism, it is interesting that the Islamists are now all of a sudden the major player in shaping how these countries will now be run. They are winning the elections, amid the continued weakness of left wing and secular organizing, and now rather than the potential for a flourishing of political involvement and new found freedom in Egypt and Tunisia, the best we can hope for is that the elected Islamists will be soft Islamists, like Turkey's Justice and Development Party, rather than hard Islamists like the Iranian or Saudi regimes.

So Islamism with its anti-political outlook shuns the actual political moment of people coming together to overthrow the dictator, but as soon as we are back to a normal situation where the people are alienated from politics, this time in the guise of electoral democracy as opposed to dictatorship, Islamism jumps in and posits that these societies should be run according to anti-political Islamic principles. What we learn from this is not that we should be suspicious of popular uprisings for fear that religious fanatics will end up taking over once the political moment has subsided, but that there needs to be some kind of organized secular left political program that can be adopted by the revolutionaries. Islam won out because there was no other organized option, the protesters were saying we want the dictator gone, but had no coherent program to put in place once he was gone.