OnIslam.net

CAIRO – As election season approaches in Tunisia and Egypt, many debates are going in the Arab region on the nature of an expected Islamic state that will succeed decades of despotism and suppression of authoritarian and ostensibly secular governments.

“That’s the struggle of the future,” Azzam Tamimi, a scholar and the author of a biography of a Tunisian Islamist, Rachid Ghannouchi, told The New York Times on Friday, September 30.

In post-revolution countries, the political struggle might no longer occur between Islamic parties and secularists, but rather among the Islamic activists themselves, Tamimi added.

“The real struggle of the future will be about who is capable of fulfilling the desires of a devout public,” he added.

“It’s going to be about who is Islamist and who is more Islamist, rather than about the secularists and the Islamists.”

The debates were heated as the dates for coming elections were set in Tunisia in October followed by Egypt in November.

Anticipating a new political order to follow elections, the Muslim Brotherhood, the most organized political group in Egypt, was expected to get a large share of voters.

The same was expected in Tunisia as Ennahda group is expected to dominate elections next month to choose an assembly to draft a constitution.

The situation was harder in Libya and Syria.

In Libya, attempts to build a state almost from scratch and the shaping of an alternative to Syria’s dictatorship are their most forceful entry yet into the region’s still embryonic body politic.

Coming out of the shadow, these groups were confronting newly urgent questions about how to apply Islamic precepts to more open societies with very concrete needs.

“It is a turning point,” said Emad Shahin, a scholar on Islamic law and politics at the University of Notre Dame who was in Cairo.

Post-Islamism

Struggling to form a new political system based on Islamic principles, many parties were citing the Turkish example as a model accepted by both Islamists and seculars.

“They feel at home with each other,” Cengiz Candar, an Arabic-speaking Turkish columnist, told New York Times.

“It’s similar terms of reference, and they can easily communicate with them.”

In Turkey and Tunisia, culturally conservative parties founded on Islamic principles were eyeing a more democratic and tolerant vision.

In Tunisia, Ghannouchi, Ennahda leader, proposed an example similar to Erdogan’s Turkey for a state based on prosperous, democratic Muslim state, led by a party that is deeply religious but operates within a system that is supposed to protect liberties.

“If the Islamic spectrum goes from Bin Laden to Erdogan, which of them is Islam?” Ghannouchi asked in a recent debate with a secular critic.

“Why are we put in the same place as a model that is far from our thought, like the Taliban or the Saudi model, while there are other successful Islamic models that are close to us, like the Turkish, the Malaysian and the Indonesian models, models that combine Islam and modernity?”

In Egypt, a similar impulse has begun to fracture the Muslim Brotherhood as a growing number of politicians and parties argue for a model inspired by Turkey.

Some even contend that the absolute monarchy of puritanical Saudi Arabia in fact violates Islamic law.

The Turkish model was rejected by the Muslim Brotherhood after Erdogan expressed hope for “a secular state in Egypt.”

Yet, the Turkish model found support among Libyan and other Egyptian politicians.

In Libya, Ali Sallabi, the most important Islamist political leader, cites Ghannouchi as a major influence.

Abdel Moneim Abou el-Fotouh, a former Muslim Brotherhood leader who is running for president in Egypt, also declared support for a state that avoids interpreting or enforcing Islamic law, regulating religious taxes or barring a person from running for president based on gender or religion.

Egypt’s Center Party, a group that struggled for 16 years to win a license from the ousted government, may go furthest here in elaborating the notion of post-Islamism.

Its founder, Abul-Ela Madi, has long sought to mediate between religious and liberal forces.

“We’re neither secular nor Islamist,” he said. “We’re in between.”